s 



/ THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 

OF THE WORKS OF 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 
AND OTHER PAPERS 



THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS 



NOVELS AND ROMANCES 

TREASURE ISLAND 

PRINCE OTTO 

KIDNAPPED 

THE BLACK ARROW 

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 

THE WRONG BOX 

THE WRECKER 

DAVID BALFOUR 

THE EBB-TIDE 

WEIR OF HERM1STON 

ST. IVES ' 

SHORTER STORIES 

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS 

THE DYNAMITER 

THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. 

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS 

ESSATS, TRAVELS, AND SKETCHES 
AN INLAND VOYAGE 
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY 
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 
FAMILIAR STUDIES 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, containing 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
ACROSS THE PLAINS 
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE 
ART OF WRITING 

POEMS 
COMPLETE POEMS 



Twenty-jive volumes. Sold singly or in sets 
Per vol., Cloth, $1.00 ; Limp Leather, $1.25 net. 

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 



BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 



VIRGINIBUS 
PUERISQUE 

AND OTHER PAPERS 



BY 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 



«« 






<M 






THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A, 



My dear William Ernest Henley, 

We are all tyisy in this world building Towers of 
Babel ; and the child of our imaginations is always 
a changeling when it comes from nurse. This is 
not only true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, 
but in the least also, like the trifling volume in your 
hand. Thus I began to write these papers with a 
. definite end : I was to be the Advocatus, not I hope 
Diaboli, but Juventutis; I was to state temperately 
the beliefs of youth as opposed to the contentions of 
age; to go over all the field where the two differ, 
and produce at last a little volume of special plead- 
ings which I might call, without misnomer, Life at 
Twenty-live. But times kept changing, and I 
shared in the change. I clung hard to that entranc- 
ing age; but, with the best will, no man can be 
twenty-five for ever. The old, ruddy convictions 
deserted me, and, along with them, the style that 
fits their presentation and defence. I saw, and in- 
deed my friends informed me, that the game was 



vi DEDICATION 

up. A good part of the volume would answer to 
the long-projected title; but the shadows of the 
prison-house are on the rest. 

It is good to have been young in youth and, as 
years go on, tcgrow older. Many are already old 
before they are through their teens; but to travel 
deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart 
out of a liberal education. Times change, opinions 
vary to their opposite, and still this world appears 
a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse 
exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what 
can be more encouraging than to find the friend 
who was welcome at one age, still welcome at an- 
other? Our .affections and beliefs are wiser than 
we ; the best that is in us is better than we can 
understand ; for it is grounded beyond experience, 
and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age 
on to another. 

These papers are like milestones on the wayside 
of my life ; and as I look back in memory, there is 
hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present 
with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many 
things have changed, you and I among the rest; 



DEDICATION vii 

but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love 

of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, 

shall survive these little revolutions undiminished, 

and, with God's help, unite us to the end. 

R. L. S. 
Davos Platz, 1881. 



CONTENTS 



"VlRGINIBUS PUERISQUE" — PAGE 

I I 

II 24 

III On Falling in Love 42 

IV Truth of Intercourse 61 

Crabbed Age and Youth 78 

An Apology for Idlers 103 

Ordered South 123 

JEs Triplex 146 

El Dorado 164 

The English Admirals 171 

Some Portraits by Raeburn 195 

Child's Play 211 

Walking Tours 232 

Pan's Pipes 248 

'A Plea for Gas Lamps 256 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 



WITH the single exception of Falstaff, 
all Shakespeare's characters are what 
we call marrying men. Mercutio, as 
he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would 
have come to the same end in the long run. Even 
Iago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was 
jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in Lear, 
although we can hardly imagine they would ever 
marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for 
a broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from 
a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single 
state. For that matter, if you turn to George 
Sand's French version of As You Like It (and I 
think I can promise you will like it but little), you 
will find Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando 
marries Rosalind. 



2 V1RGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

At least there seems to have been much less 
hesitation over marriage in Shakespeare's days; 
and what hesitation there was was of a laughing 
sort, and not much more serious, one way or the 
other, than that of Panurge. In modern comedies 
the heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of think- 
ing, but i;wice as much in earnest, and not one 
quarter so confident. And I take this diffidence 
as a proof of how sincere their terror is. They 
know they are only human after all ; they know 
what gins and pitfalls lie about their feet; and 
how the shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and 
awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to 
keep their liberty; but if that may not be, why, 
God's will be done ! " What, are you afraid of 
marriage?" asks Cecile, in Maitre Gucrin. "Oh, 
mon Dieu, non!" replies Arthur; "I should take 
chloroform." They look forward to marriage 
much in the same way as they prepare themselves 
for death : each seems inevitable ; each is a great 
Perhaps, and a leap into the dark, for which, 
when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially 
to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 3 

Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages 
much as an old man hears the deaths of his con- 
temporaries. " C'est desesperant," he cried, throw- 
ing himself down in the arm-chair at Madame 
Schontz's ; " c'est desesperant, nous nous marions 
tous!" Every marriage was like another grey 
hair on his head ; and the jolly church bells seemed 
to taunt him with his fifty years and fair round 
belly. 

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life 
than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts 
either to marry or not to marry. Marriage is 
terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. 
The friendships of men are vastly agreeable, but 
they are insecure. You know all the time that 
one friend will marry and put you to the door; 
a second accept a situation in China, and become 
no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and 
an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read ; 
a third will take up with some religious crotchet 
and treat you to sour looks thenceforward. So, 
in one way or another, life forces men apart 
and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. 



4 VIRGIN1BUS PUERISQUE 

The very flexibility and ease which make men's 
friendships so agreeable while they endure, make 
them the easier to destroy and forget. And a 
man who has a few friends, or one who has a 
dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this 
earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base 
his happiness reposes ; and how by a stroke or 
two of fate — a death, a few light words, a piece 
of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes — he 
may be left, in a month, destitute of all. Mar- 
riage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of 
on two or three, you stake your happiness on one 
life only. But still, as the bargain is more ex- 
plicit and complete on your part, it is more so 
on the other; and you have not to fear so many 
contingencies ; it is not every wind that can blow 
you from your anchorage; and so long as Death 
withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend 
at home. People who share a cell in the Bastille, 
or are thrown together on an uninhabited island, 
if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will 
find some possible ground of compromise. They 
will learn each other's ways and humours, so as 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 5 

to know where they must go warily, and where 
they may lean their whole weight. The discre- 
tion of the first years becomes the settled habit 
of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, 
two lives may grow indissolubly into one. 

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all 
heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the spirits 
of generotiL men. In marriage, a man becomes 
slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degener- 
ation of his moral being. It is not only when 
Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, 
but when Ladislaw marries above him with Doro- 
thea, that this may be exemplified. The air of 
the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of 
the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and 
happy that he begins to prefer comfort and hap- 
piness to everything else on earth, his wife in- 
cluded. Yesterday he would have shared his last 
shilling ; to-day " his first duty is to his family," 
and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down 
vintages and husbanding the health of an invalu- 
able parent. Twenty years ago this man was 
equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is 



6 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may 
speak without constraint; you will not wake him. 
It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a 
bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For 
women, there is less of this danger. Marriage is 
of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so 
much more of life, and puts her in the way of so 
much more freedom and usefulness, that, whether 
she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some 
benefit. It is true, however, that some of the 
merriest and most genuine of women are old 
maids; and that those old maids, and wives who 
are unhappily married, have often most of the 
true motherly touch. And this would seem to 
show, even for women, some narrowing influ- 
ence in comfortable married life. But the rule is 
none the less certain : if you wish the pick of men 
and women, take a good bachelor and a good 
wife. 

I am often filled with wonder that so many 
marriages are passably successful, and so few 
come to open failure, the more so as I fail to 
understand the principle on which people regulate 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 7 

their choice. I see women marrying indiscrim- 
inately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced, 
white-eyed boys, and men dwelling in contentment 
with noisy scullions, or taking into their lives 
acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say 
the good people marry because they fall in love; 
and of course you may use and misuse a word 
as much as you please, if you have the world 
along with you. But love is at least a somewhat 
hyperbolical expression for such lukewarm pref- 
erence. It is not here, anyway, that Love em- 
ploys his golden shafts; he cannot be said, with 
any fitness of language, to reign here and revel. 
Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets 
have been fooling with mankind since the foun- 
dation of the world. And you have only to look 
these happy couples in the face, to see they have 
never been in love, or in hate, or in any other 
high passion, all their days. When you see a 
dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your 
affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, 
watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the 
table, and feel quite a sensible disappointment when 



8 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

it is taken by some one else. I have used the 
phrase " high passion." Well, I should say this 
was about as high a passion as generally leads 
to marriage. One husband hears after marriage 
that some poor fellow is dying of his wife's love. 
" What a pity! " he exclaims; " you know I could 
so easily have got another!" And yet that is a 
very happy union. Or again : A young man was 
telling me the sweet story of his loves. " I like 
it well enough as long as her sisters are there," 
said this amorous swain ; " but I don't know what 
to do when we 're alone." Once more : A married 
lady was debating the subject with another lady. 
" You know, dear," said the first, " after ten years 
of marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband 
is always an old friend." 'I have many old 
friends," returned the other, " but I prefer them 
to be nothing more." " Oh, perhaps I might pre- 
fer that also ! " There is a common note in these 
three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it 
must be owned the god goes among us with a 
limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether 
it was so always; whether desire was always 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 9 

equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally 
cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, 
ere they marry, some such table of recommenda- 
tions as Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother 
William anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so 
charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, 
that I must quote a few phrases. " The young 
lady is in every sense formed to make one of your 
disposition really happy. She has a pleasing voice, 
with which she accompanies her musical instru- 
ment with judgment. She has an easy politeness 
in her manners, neither free nor reserved. She 
is a good housekeeper and a good economist, and 
yet of a generous disposition. As to her internal 
accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more 
highly of them : good sense without vanity, a 
penetrating judgment without a disposition to 
satire, with about as much religion as my William 
likes, struck me with a wish that she was my Wil- 
liam's wife." That is about the tune: pleasing 
voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable in- 
ternal accomplishments after the style of the 
copy-book, with about as much religion as 



io VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

my William likes; and then, with all speed, to 
church. 

To deal plainly, if they only married when they 
fell in love, most people would die unwed; and 
among the others, there would be not a few tu- 
multuous households. The Lion is the King of 
Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic 
pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather too 
violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good 
domestic sentiment. Like other violent excite- 
ments, it throws up not only what is best, but 
what is worst and smallest, in men's charac- 
ters. Just as some people are malicious in 
drink, or brawling and virulent under the influ- 
ence of religious feeling, some are moody, jeal- 
ous, and exacting when they are in love, who are 
honest, downright, good-hearted fellows enough 
in the everyday affairs and humours of the 
world. 

How then, seeing we are driven to the hy- 
pothesis that people choose in comparatively cold 
blood, how is it they choose so well? One is 
almost tempted to hint that it does not much 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE n 

matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage 
is a subjective affection, and if you have made 
up your mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly 
over, you could " pull it through " with anybody. 
But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even 
if we regard it as no more than a sort of friend- 
ship recognised by the police, there must be degrees 
in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some 
principle to guide simple folk in their selection. 
Now what should this principle be? Are there 
no more definite rules than are to be found in the 
Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the bans 
on the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; 
society steps in to separate classes ; and in all 
this most critical matter, has common-sense, has 
wisdom, never a word to say? In the absence of 
more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over be- 
tween friends : even a few guesses may be of 
interest to youths and maidens. 

In all that concerns eating and drinking, com- 
pany, climate, and ways of life, community of 
taste is to sought for. It would be trying, for 
instance, to keep bed and board with an early 



i2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

riser or a vegetarian. In matters of art and in- 
tellect, I believe it is of no consequence. Cer- 
tainly it is of none in the companionships of men, 
who will dine more readily with one who has a 
good heart, a good cellar, and a humourous tongue, 
than with another who shares all their favour- 
ite hobbies and is melancholy withal. If your 
wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you 
should hang your head. She thinks with the ma- 
jority, and has the courage of her opinions. I 
have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel 
product out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt 
sure, if you could only find an honest man of no 
special literary bent, he would tell you he thought 
much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, 
and all of him written in very obscure English 
and wearisome to read. And not long ago I 
was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I 
found the honest man. He was a fellow of parts, 
quick, humourous, a clever painter, and with an 
eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. 
I am not much of a judge of that kind of thing, 
but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 13 

at night. How strong, supple, and living the 
ship seems upon the billows ! With what a dip 
and rake she shears the flying sea! I cannot 
fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it 
on the wing with so much force and spirit, was 
what you call commonplace in the last recesses of 
the heart. And yet he thought, and was not 
ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida 
was better in every way than William Shake- 
speare. If there were more people of his honesty, 
this would be about the staple of lay criticism. 
It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is 
rare. And what have we in place? How many, 
who think no otherwise than the young painter, 
have we not heard disbursing second-hand hy- 
perboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, 
O best of critics ! when some of your own sweet 
adjectives were returned on you before a gaping 
audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a 
function of the average female being, which she 
performs with precision and a sort of haunting 
sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated 
machine. Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is 



i 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives 
with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some 
shameful moments. When you remember that, 
you will be tempted to put things strongly, and 
say you will marry no one who is not like George 
the Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for 
poetry and painting. 

The word " facts " is, in some ways, crucial. I 
have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, 
mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans 
and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; 
and each understood the word " facts " in an 
occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I 
could get no nearer the principle of their divi- 
sion. What was essential to them, seemed to me 
trivial or untrue. We could come to no com- 
promise as to what was, or what was not, impor- 
tant in the life of man. Turn as we pleased, we 
all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw 
another quarter of the heavens, with different 
mountain-tops along the sky-line and different 
constellations overhead. We had each of us some 
whimsy in the brain, which we believed more 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 15 

than anything else, and which discoloured all ex- 
perience to its own shade. How would you have 
people agree, when one is deaf and the other 
blind? Now this is where there should be com- 
munity between man and wife. They should be 
agreed on their catchword in "facts of religion," 
or " facts of science," or " society, my dear " ; for 
without such an agreement all intercourse is a 
painful strain upon the mind. " About as much 
religion as my William likes," in short, that is 
what is necessary to make a happy couple of any 
William and his spouse. For there are differences 
which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and 
the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Phari- 
see. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budgett, 
the wife of the successful merchant ! The best 
of men and the best of women may sometimes 
live together all their lives, and, for want of some 
consent on fundamental questions, hold each other 
lost spirits to the end. 

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable 
for people who would spend years together and 
not bore themselves to death. But the talent, like 



16 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

the agreement, must be for and about life. To 
dwell happily together, they should be versed in 
the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty 
for willing compromise. The woman must be 
talented as a woman, and it will not much matter 
although she is talented in nothing else. She must 
know her metier dc femme, and have a fine touch 
for the affections. And it is more important that 
a person should be a good gossip, and talk pleas- 
antly and smartly of common friends and the 
thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, 
than that she should speak with the tongues of 
men and angels; for awhile together by the fire, 
happens more frequently in marriage than the 
presence of a distinguished foreigner to dinner. 
That people should laugh over the same sort of 
jests, and have many a story of " grouse in the 
gun-room," many an old joke between them which 
time cannot .wither nor custom stale, is a better 
preparation for life, by your leave, than many 
other things higher and better sounding in the 
world's ears. You could read Kant by yourself, 
if you wanted; but you must share a joke with 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 17 

some one else. You pan forgive people who do 
not follow you through a philosophical disquisi- 
tion; but to find your wife laughing when you 
had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were 
in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards 
a dissolution of the marriage. 

I know a woman who, from some distaste or 
disability, could never so much as understand the 
meaning of the word politics, and has given up 
trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories ; but take 
her on her own politics, ask her about other men 
or women and the chicanery of everyday exist- 
ence — the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which 
life turns — and you will not find many more 
shrewd, trenchant, and humourous. Nay, to make 
plainer what I have in mind, this same woman 
has a share of the higher and more poetical un- 
derstanding, frank interest in things for their own 
sake, and enduring astonishment at the most com- 
mon. She is not to be deceived by custom, or 
made to think a mystery solved when it is re- 
peated. I have heard her say she could wonder 
herself crazy over the human eyebrow. Now in 



18 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

a world where most of us walk very contentedly 
in the little lit circle of their own reason, and 
have to be reminded of what lies without by 
specious and clamant exceptions — earthquakes, 
eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid- 
air at a seance, and the like — a mind so fresh and 
unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will own 
I think it a better sort of mind than goes neces- 
sarily with the clearest views on public business. 
It will wash. It will find something to say at an 
odd moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant 
and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine my- 
self yawning all night long until my jaws ached 
and the tears came into my eyes, although my 
companion on the other side of the hearth held 
the most enlightened opinions on the franchise or 
the ballot. 

The question of professions, in as far as they 
regard marriage, was only interesting to women 
until of late days, but it touches all of us now. 
Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry 
a wife who wrote. The practice of letters is mis- 
erably harassing to the mind; and after an hour 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 19 

or two's work, all the more human portion of the 
author is extinct ; he will bully, backbite, and 
speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better. 
But painting, on the contrary, is often highly seda- 
tive; because so much of the labour, after your 
picture is once begun, is' almost entirely manual, 
and of that skilled sort of manual labour which 
offers a continual series of successes, and so 
tickles a man, through his vanity, into good- 
humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this 
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you 
will, you have always something else to think of, 
and cannot pause to notice your loops and flour- 
ishes ; they are beside the mark, and the first law 
stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, 
indeed, made some account of penmanship, even 
made it a source of livelihood, when he copied 
out the Helo'ise for dilettante ladies; and therein 
showed that strange eccentric prudence which 
guided him among so many thousand follies and 
insanities. It would be well for all of the genus 
irritabile thus to add something of skilled labour 
to intangible brain-work. To find the right word 



20 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

is so doubtful a success and lies so near to fail- 
ure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of 
it; but we all know when we have formed a 
letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or 
wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a 
right tone or a right colour, or made a dexter- 
ous stroke with his brush. And, again, painters 
may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the 
deliberate seasons, and the " tranquillising influ- 
ence " of the green earth, counterbalance the 
fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, 
and prosaic. 

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is 
a marriage of love, for absences are a good in- 
fluence in love and keep it bright and delicate; 
but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more 
pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn open 
and the solder has never time to set. Men who 
fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or 
gather sea-weeds, will make admirable husbands; 
and a little amateur painting in water-colour shows 
the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a 
few intimates are to be avoided; while those who 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 21 

swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all 
along the street, who can number an infinity of 
acquaintances and are not chargeable with any 
one friend, promise an easy disposition and no 
rival to the wife's influence. I will not say they 
are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of 
which adroit and capable women manufacture the 
best of husbands. It is to be noticed that those 
who have loved once or twice already are so much 
the better educated to a woman's hand ; the bright 

A 

boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable *■"■■•* 
mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a 
deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, 
the golden rule), no woman should marry a tee- 
totaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not 
for nothing that this " ignoble tabagie," as Miche- 
let calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet 
rails against it because it renders you happy apart 
from thought or work ; to provident women this 
will seem no evil influence in married life. What- 
ever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever 
checks wandering fancy and all inordinate am- 
bition, whatever makes for lounging and con- 



22 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

tentment, makes just so surely for domestic 
happiness. 

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, 
will probably amuse him more when he differs 
than when he agrees with them ; at least they will 
do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. 
But the last word is of more concern. Marriage 
is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts 
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. 
' They have been so tried among the inconstant 
squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands 
in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, 
that they will risk all for solid ground below their 
feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, 
weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as 
if marriage were the royal road through life, and 
realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed 
on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at 
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of liv- 
ing. They think it will sober and change them. 
Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it 
needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour 
for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 13 

the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, pass- 
ing faces leave a regret behind them, and the 
whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. 
For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field 
of battle, and not a bed of roses. 



II 

HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period 
of our existence. From first to last, and 
in the face of smarting disillusions, we 
continue to expect good fortune, better health, and 
better conduct; and that so confidently, that we 
judge it needless to deserve them. I think it im- 
probable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, 
conduct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish 
myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; 
and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when 
I am very ready to believe that I shall combine 
all these various excellences in my own person, 
and go marching down to posterity with divine 
honours. There is nothing so monstrous but we 
can believe it of ourselves. About ourselves, 
about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have 
dwelt by choice in a delicious vagueness from our 
boyhood up. No one will have forgotten Tom 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 25 

Sawyer's aspiration : " Ah, if he could only die 
temporarily! " Or, perhaps, better still, the in- 
ward resolution of the two pirates, that " so long 
as they remained in that business, their piracies 
should not again be sullied with the crime of steal- 
ing." Here we recognise the thoughts of our 
boyhood ; and our boyhood ceased — well, when ? 
— not, I think, at twenty ; nor, perhaps, altogether 
at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to 
be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that 
Arcadian period. For as the race of man, after 
centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of 
their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is 
not altogether quit of youth, when he is already 
old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of Eng- 
land. We advance in years somewhat in the man- 
ner of an invading army in a barren land ; the age 
that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but 
hold with an outpost, and still keep open our com- 
munications with the extreme rear and first be- 
ginnings of the march. There is our true base; 
that is not only the beginning, but the perennial 
spring of our faculties; and grandfather William 



26 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted 
forest of his boyhood. 

The unfading boyishness of hope and its vig- 
orous irrationality are nowhere better displayed 
than in questions of conduct. There is a charac- 
ter in the Pilgrim's Progress, one Mr. Lingcr- 
aftcr-Lust, with whom I fancy we are all on speak- 
ing terms; one famous among the famous for 
ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the moment 
of defeat ; one who, after eighty years of contrary 
experience, will believe it possible to continue in 
the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of 
theft. Every sin is our last; every ist of January 
a remarkable turning-point in our career. Any 
overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its 
power to change. A drunkard takes the pledge; 
it will be strange if that does not help him. For 
how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make 
and break his little vows? And yet I have not 
heard that he was discouraged in the end. By 
such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution ; 
as a timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while 
the tooth is stinging. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 27 

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of 
flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the in- 
evitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in morality ; 
and even the " sanctimonious ceremony " of mar- 
riage leaves the man unchanged. This is a hard 
saying, and has an air of paradox. For there 
is something in marriage so natural and invit- 
ing, that the step has an air of great simplicity 
and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching 
preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and 
familiar company through life; it opens up a 
smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind 
of love, rather than the blessing and active ; it 
is approached not only through the delights 
of courtship, but by a public performance and 
repeated legal signatures. A man naturally 
thinks it will go hard with him if he cannot be 
good and fortunate and happy within such august 
circumvallations. 

And yet there is probably no other act in a 
man's life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this 
one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you 
have been making the most indifferent business 



28 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of your career. Your experience has not, we may 
dare to say, been more encouraging than Paul's 
or Horace's ; like them, you have seen and desired 
the good that you were not able to accomplish ; 
like them, you have done the evil that you loathed. 
You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, 
according to your habit of body, remembering, 
with dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts 
and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted 
to withdraw entirely from this game of life ; as 
a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws 
from that less dangerous one of billiards. You 
have fallen back upon the thought that you your- 
self most sharply smarted for your misdemean- 
ours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you 
were nobody's enemy but your own. And then 
you have been made aware of what was beautiful 
and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of 
your behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing could 
reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. 
If you are a man, you have shut your mouth 
hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man 
in the making, you have recognised that yours 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 29 

was quite a special case, and you yourself not 
guilty of your own pestiferous career. 

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept 
these apologies ; let us agree that you are nobody's 
enemy but your own; let us agree that you are a 
sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let 
us regard you with the unmingled pity due to 
such a fate. But there is one thing to which, 
on these terms, we can never agree : — we can 
never agree to have you marry. What! you have 
had one life to manage, and have failed so 
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than 
to conjoin with it the management of some one 
else's? Because you have been unfaithful in a 
very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over 
ten cities. You strip yourself by such a step of all 
remaining consolations and excuses. You are no 
longer content to be your own enemy; you must 
be your wife's also. You have been hitherto in 
a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows 
about you in life, yet only half responsible, since 
you came there by no choice or movement of your 
own. Now, it appears, you must take things on 



3 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

your own authority : God made you, but you marry 
yourself; and for all that your wife suffers, no 
one is responsible but you. A man must be very 
certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide 
a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; 
you have eternally missed your way in life, with 
consequences that you still deplore, and yet you 
masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, 
drag her after you to ruin. And it is your wife, 
you observe, whom you select. She, whose happi- 
ness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. 
You would earnestly warn her from a tottering 
bridge or bad investment. If she were to marry 
some one else, how you would tremble for her 
fate! If she were only your sister, and you 
thought half as much of her, how doubtfully 
would you entrust her future to a man no better 
than yourself! 

Times are changed with him who marries; 
there are no more by-path meadows, where you 
may innocently linger, but the road lies long and 
straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which 
is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 31 

begins to wear a different aspect when you have 
a wife to support. Suppose, after you are mar- 
ried, one of those little slips were to befall you.- 
What happened last November might surely hap- 
pen February next. They may have annoyed you 
at the time, because they were not what you had 
meant ; but how will they annoy you in the future, 
and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's 
confidence and peace ! A thousand things unpleas- 
ing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you 
shrank from too particularly realising; you did 
not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your 
conscience; you would recognise your failures 
with a nod, and so, good-day. But the time for 
these reserves is over. You have wilfully intro- 
duced a witness into your life, the scene of these 
defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye 
upon uncomely passages, but must stand up 
straight and put a name upon your actions. And 
your witness is not only the judge, but the victim 
of your sins ; not only can she condemn you to 
the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share 
feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once 



3 2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

more, with what temerity you have chosen pre- 
cisely her to be your spy, whose esteem you value 
highest, and whom you have already taught to 
think you better than you are. You may think you 
had a conscience, and believed in God; but what 
is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore 
erected statues of their deities, and consciously 
performed their part in life before those marble 
eyes. A god watched them at the board, and 
stood by their bedside in the morning when they 
woke; and all about their ancient cities, where 
they bought and sold, or where they piped and 
wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the 
things that are outside of man. These were les- 
sons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which 
told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the 
same lesson, if you will — but how harrowingly 
taught ! — when the woman you respect shall weep 
from your unkindness or blush with shame at 
your misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their 
painted Madonnas to the wall : you cannot set 
aside your wife. To marry is to domesticate the 
Recording Angel. Once you are married, there 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 33 

is nothing left for yon, not even suicide, but to 
be good. 

And goodness in marriage is a more intricate 
problem than mere single virtue ; for in marriage 
there are two ideals to be realised. A girl, it is 
true, has always lived in a glass house among 
reproving relatives, whose word was law ; she has 
been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and take 
the key submissively from dear papa ; and it is 
wonderful how swiftly she can change her tune 
into the husband's. Her morality has been, too 
often, an affair of precept and conformity. But 
in the case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some 
measure both of privacy and freedom, his moral 
judgments have been passed in some accordance 
with his nature. His sins were always sins in 
his own sight ; he could then only sin when he 
did some act against his clear conviction ; the light 
that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. 
Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put 
their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this com- 
parative certainty a huge w r elter of competing ju- 
risdictions. It no longer matters so much how 

3 



34 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

life appears to one ; one must consult another : one, 
who may be strong, must not offend the other, 
who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing 
to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. 
For her, and for her only, I must waive my 
righteous judgments, and go crookedly about my 
life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of com- 
promise, to keep honour bright and abstain from 
base capitulations? How are you to put aside 
love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of 
laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of 
precision ; and after these years of ragged practice, 
pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you 
out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence 
lies the particular peril to morality in married life. 
Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, 
and for awhile continue to accept these change- 
lings with a gross complacency. At last Love 
wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk 
into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; 
finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; 
and in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees 
for ever. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 3 $ 

Again, the husband, . in these unions, is usually 
a man, and the wife commonly enough a woman; 
and when this is the case, although it makes the 
firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of mis- 
conception hangs above the doubtful business. 
Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men ; 
but then, if I were a woman myself, I dare say I 
should hold the reverse; and at least we all enter 
more or less wholly into one or other of these 
camps. A man who delights women by his femi- 
nine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by 
a chance explosion of the under side of man ; and 
the most masculine and direct of women will some 
day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a tele- 
scope into successive lengths of personation. Alas ! 
for the man, knowing her to be at heart more 
candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, 
through these mazes in the quest for truth. The 
proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally 
surprising to the other. Between the Latin and 
the Teuton races there are similar divergences, 
not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. 
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations 



36 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of this life, which pass current among - us as the 
wisdom of the elders, this difficulty has been turned 
with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young 
lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak 
of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings 
ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidel- 
ity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may 
be a little devil after all. Yet so it is : she 
may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she 
may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My 
compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond 
Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has trans- 
muted to the ends of art, by the companion fig- 
ure of Lydgate ; and the satire was much wanted 
for the education of young men. That doctrine 
of the excellence of women, however chivalrous, 
is cowardly as well as false. It is better to face 
the fact, and know, when you marry, that you 
take into your life a creature of equal, if of un- 
like, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no 
more tunefully than yours. 

But it is the object of a liberal education not 
only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 37 

another, but to magnify the natural differences 
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not 
upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; 
and the little rift between the sexes is astonish- 
ingly widened by simply teaching one set of 
catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. 
To the first, there is shown but a very small 
field of experience, and taught a very trenchant 
principle for judgment and action ; to the other, 
the world of life is more largely displayed, and 
their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. 
They are taught to follow different virtues, to 
hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for 
each other, in different achievements. What 
should be the result of such a course? When a 
horse has run away, and the two flustered people 
in the gig have each possessed themselves of a 
rein, we know the end of that conveyance will 
be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw youth 
and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing 
measure into that most serious contract, and set- 
ting out upon life's journey with ideas so mon- 
strously divergent, I am not surprised that some 



38 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What 
the boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, 
the girl will shudder at as a debasing vice; what 
is to her the mere common-sense of tactics, he 
will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through 
such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple 
steer their way ; and contrive to love each other ; 
and to respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the 
time arrives, to educate the little men and women 
who shall succeed to their places and perplexities. 

And yet, when all has been said, the man who 
should hold back from marriage is in the same 
case with him who runs away from battle. To 
avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse de- 
gree of failure than to push forward pluckily and 
make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be 
not led into temptation ; but not lawful to skulk 
from those that come to us. The noblest passage 
in one of the noblest books of this century, is 
where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in 
the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the 
younger hero. 1 Without some such manly note, 

1 Browning's Ring and Book. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 39 

it were perhaps better to have no conscience at 
all. But there is a vast difference between teach- 
ing flight, and showing points of peril that a 
man may march the more warily. And the true 
conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on 
apprehensions, and embrace that shining and cour- 
ageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, 
headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows 
with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet 
smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open- 
eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, 
of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty 
of human resolution. Hope looks for unquali- 
fied success; but Faith counts certainly on fail- 
ure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form 
of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith 
grew up in Christian days, and early learnt hu- 
mility. In the one temper, a man is indignant 
that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of 
elegance and virtue ; in the other, out of a sense 
of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence be- 
cause a year has come and gone, and he has still 
preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he 



4 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

expects an angel for a wife ; in the last, he knows 
that she is like himself — erring, thoughtless, and 
untrue; but like himself also, filled with a strug- 
gling radiancy of better things, and adorned with 
ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school 
with hope ; but ere you marry, should have learned 
the mingled lesson of the world : that dolls are 
stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play- 
things; that hope and love address themselves 
to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, 
become the salt and staff of life; that you your- 
self are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you 
might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a 
something in you lovable and worth preserving; 
and that, while the mass of mankind lies under 
this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find 
one but, by some generous reading, will become 
to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse 
through life. So thinking, you will constantly 
support your own unworthiness, and easily, for- 
give the failings of your friend. Nay, you will 
be wisely glad that you retain the sense of blem- 
ishes; for the faults of married people contin- 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 41 

ually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to 
do better and to meet and love upon a higher 
ground. And ever, between the failures, there 
will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage 
and console. 






Ill 

ON FALLING IN LOVE 
" Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " 

THERE is only one event in life which 
really astonishes a man and startles him 
out of his prepared opinions. Every- 
thing else befalls him very much as he expected. 
Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety 
indeed, but with little that is either startling or 
intense; they form together no more than a sort 
of background, or running accompaniment to the 
man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into 
a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and 
builds himself up in a conception of life which 
expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of 
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to 
the vagaries of his friends and acquaintances 
under the influence of love. He may sometimes 
look forward to it for himself with an incom- 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 43 

prehensible expectation. But it is a subject in 
which neither intuition nor the behaviour of 
others will help the philosopher to the truth. 
There is probably nothing rightly thought or 
rightly written on this matter of love that is not 
a piece of the person's experience. I remember 
an anecdote of a well-known French theorist, 
who was debating a point eagerly in his cenacle. 
It was objected against him that he had never 
experienced love. Whereupon he arose, left the 
society, and made it a point not to return to it 
until he considered that he had supplied the de- 
fect. " Now," he remarked, on entering, " now 
I am in a position to continue the discussion." 
Perhaps he had not penetrated very deeply into 
the subject after all ; but the story indicates right 
thinking, and may serve as an apologue to readers 
of this essay. 

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it 
is not without something of the nature of dismay 
that the man finds himself in such changed con- 
ditions. He has to deal with commanding emo- 
tions instead of the easy dislikes and preferences 



44 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

in which he has hitherto passed his days; and 
he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure 
of which he had not yet suspected the existence. 
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the 
one thing of which we are tempted to think as 
supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. 
The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. 
Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very 
amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and 
look a little into each other's eyes. That has been 
done a dozen or so of times in the experience 
of either with no great result. But on this oc- 
casion all is different. They fall at once into that 
state in which another person becomes to us the 
very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and 
demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; 
in which our ideas are so bound up with the one 
master-thought that even the trivial cares of our 
own person become so many acts of devotion, and 
the love of life itself is translated into a wish to 
remain in the same world with so precious and 
desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while 
their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 45 

each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what 
so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-an-one 
in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot 
tell you. For my part, I cannot think what the 
women mean. It might be very well, if the 
Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all over 
into life, and step forward from the pedestal with 
that godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten 
changelings who call themselves men, and prate 
intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one 
who seemed worthy to inspire love — no, nor read 
of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps 
Goethe in his youth. About women I entertain 
a somewhat different opinion ; but there, I have 
the misfortune to be a man. 

There are many matters in which you may 
waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. 
Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excite- 
ment, and a great deal more that forms a part 
of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare, 
are within the reach of almost any one who can 
dare a little and be patient. But it is by no 
means in the way of every one to fall in love. 



46 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into 
when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Fal- 
staff in love. I do not believe that Henry Field- 
ing was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for 
a passage or two in Rob Roy, would give me 
very much the same effect. These are great 
names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, 
healthy, high-strung, and generous natures, of 
whom the reverse might have been expected. As 
for the innumerable army of anaemic and tailorish 
persons who occupy the face of this planet with 
so much propriety, it is palpably absurd to im- 
agine them in any such situation as a love-affair. 
A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man 
is blind, he cannot expect to be much impressed 
by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many 
lovable people miss each other in the world, or 
meet under some unfavourable star. There is 
the nice and critical moment of declaration to be 
got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity 
a good half of possible love cases never get so 
far, and at least another quarter do there cease 
and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 47 

manages to prepare the way and out with his 
declaration in the nick of time. And then there 
is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from 
snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty 
times, will continue imperturbably declaring, amid 
the astonished consideration of men and angels, 
until he has a favourable answer. I dare say, 
if one were a woman, one would like to marry 
a man who was capable of doing this, but not 
quite one who had done so. It is just a little 
bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; 
and marriages in which one of the parties has 
been thus battered into consent scarcely form 
agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should 
run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, 
the ideal story is that of two people who go into 
love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, 
like a pair of children venturing together into a 
dark room. From the first moment when they 
see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through 
stage after stage of growing pleasure and em- 
barrassment, they can read the expression of 
their own trouble in each other's eyes. There 



4.8 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

is here no declaration properly so called ; the feel- 
ing is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man 
knows what it is in his own heart, he is sure of 
what it is in the woman's. 

This simple accident of falling in love is as 
beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the 
petrifying influence of years, disproves cold- 
blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens 
dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had 
found it a good policy to disbelieve the exist- 
ence of any enjoyment which was out of his 
reach ; and thus he turned his back upon the 
strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed 
himself to look exclusively on what was common 
and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself 
go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if 
he were young and witty, or beautiful', wilfully 
forewent these advantages. He joined himself 
to the following of what, in the old mythology 
of love, was prettily called nonchaloir; and in 
an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, 
a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash 
of that fear with which honest people regard 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 49 

serious interests, kept- himself back from the 
straightforward course of life among certain se- 
lected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he 
v is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affec- 
tation. His heart, which has been ticking ac- 
curate seconds for the last year, gives a bound 
and begins to beat high and irregularly in his 
breast. It seems as if he had never heard or 
felt or seen until that moment; and by the re- 
port of his memory, he must have lived his past 
life between sleep or waking, or with the pre- 
occupied attention of a brown study. He is 
practically incommoded by the generosity of his 
feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and de- 
velops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the 
moon and stars. But it is not at all within the 
province of a prose essayist to give a picture of 
this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing 
has been done already, and that to admiration. 
In Adelaide, in Tennyson's Maud, and in some 
of Heine's songs, you get the absolute expression 
of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet 
were very much in love; although they tell me 



5 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

some German critics are of a different opinion, 
probably the same who would have us think 
Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in 
love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, 
in Les Miserablcs, is also a genuine case in his 
own way, and worth observation. A good many 
of George Sand's people are thoroughly in love; 
and so are a good many of George Meredith's. 
Altogether, there is plenty to read on the subject. 
If the root of the matter be in him, and if he 
has the requisite chords to set in vibration, a 
young man may occasionally enter, with the key 
of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon 
the borders of Heaven and within sight of the 
City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch 
delightful hopes and perilous illusions. 

One thing that accompanies the passion in its 
first blush is certainly difficult to explain. It 
comes (I do not quite see how) that from hav- 
ing a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts 
of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in 
motion, in breathing, in continuing to be — the 
lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 51 

for the rest of the world and highly meritorious 
in himself. Our race has never been able con- 
tentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, 
conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner 
of an inconsiderable star, does not re-echo among 
the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable 
effect. In much the same taste, when people find 
a great to-do in their own breasts, they imagine 
it must have some influence in their neighbour- 
hood. The presence of the two lovers is so en- 
chanting to each other that it seems as if it must 
be the best thing possible for everybody else. They 
are half inclined to fancy it is because of them 
and their love that the sky is blue and the sun 
shines. And certainly the weather is usually fine 
while people are courting. ... In point of fact, 
although the happy man feels very kindly towards 
others of his own sex, there is apt to be some- 
thing too much of the magnifico in his demeanour. 
If people grow presuming and self-important over 
such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they 
will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life 
without some suspicion of a strut; and the diz- 



52 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. 
Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle conde- 
scending in their address to other men. An over- 
weening sense of the passion and importance of 
life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To 
women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and 
very generously, as if they were so many Joan- 
of-Arcs; but this does not come out in their 
behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian 
airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am 
not quite certain that women do not like this sort 
of thing; but really, after having bemused myself 
over Daniel Dcronda, I have given up trying to 
understand what they like. 

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridicu- 
lous superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is 
somehow blessed to others, and everybody is made 
happier in their happiness, would serve at least 
to keep love generous and great-hearted. Nor is 
it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other 
lovers are hugely interested. They strike the 
nicest balance between pity and approval, when 
they see people aping the greatness of their own 






VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE S 3 

sentiments. It is an understood thing in the 
play, that while the young gentlefolk are court- 
ing on the terrace, a rough flirtation is being 
carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is 
growing up, between the footman and the singing 
chambermaid. As people are generally cast for 
the leading parts in their own imaginations, the 
reader can apply the parallel to real life without 
much chance of going wrong. In short, they are 
quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep- 
seated as their own, but they like dearly to see 
it going forward. And love, considered as a 
spectacle, must have attractions for many who 
are not of the confraternity. The sentimental 
old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and 
he must be rather a poor sort of human being, 
to be sure, who can look on at this pretty 
madness without indulgence and sympathy. For 
nature commends itself to people with a most 
insinuating art; the busiest is now and again 
arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as 
pacific or as cold-blooded as you will, but you 
cannot help some emotion when you read of 



54 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of lovers in 
the lane. 

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to 
the world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure 
is true as between the sweethearts. To do good 
and communicate is the lover's grand intention. 
It is the happiness of the other that makes his 
own most intense gratification. It is not possible 
to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, 
humility, pity and passion, which are excited by 
a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. 
To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, 
to excel in talk, to do anything and all things 
that puff out the character and attributes and 
make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not 
only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most 
delicate homage at the same time. And it is in 
this latter intention that they are done by lovers; 
for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed 
it may be best defined as passionate kindness: 
kindness, so to speak, run mad and become im- 
portunate and violent. Vanity in a merely per- 
sonal sense exists no longer. The lover takes a 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 5 5 

perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak 
points and having them, one after another, ac- 
cepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured 
that he is not loved for this or that good quality, 
but for himself, or something as like himself as 
he can contrive to set forward. For, although it 
may have been a very difficult thing to paint the 
marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of 
Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult 
piece of art before every one in this world who 
cares to set about explaining his own character 
to others. Words and acts are easily wrenched 
from their true significance ; and they are all the 
language we have to come and go upon. A piti- 
ful job we make of it, as a rule. For better or 
worse, people mistake our meaning and take our 
emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally 
we rest pretty content with our failures ; we are 
content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; 
but when once a man is moonstruck with this 
affection of love, he makes it a point of honour 
to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have 
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this 



56 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

importance; and his pride revolts at being loved 
in a mistake. 

He discovers a great reluctance to return on 
former periods of his life. To all that has not 
been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone 
fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only 
by a difficult and repugnant effort of the will. 
That he should have wasted some years in igno- 
rance of what alone was really important, that 
he may have entertained the thought of other 
women with any show of complacency, is a bur- 
then almost too heavy for his self-respect. But 
it is the thought of another past that rankles 
in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That he 
himself made a fashion of being alive in the 
bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is 
deplorable enough in all good conscience. But 
that She should have permitted herself the 
same liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine 
providence. 

A great many people run down jealousy, on 
the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well 
as practically inconvenient. This is scarcely fair; 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 57 

for the feeling on which it merely attends, like 
an ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in ex- 
actly the same sense and to the same degree. I 
suppose what is meant by that objection is that 
jealousy has not always been a character of man ; 
formed no part of that very modest kit of sen- 
timents with which he is supposed to have begun 
the world; but waited to make its appearance in 
better days and among richer natures. And this 
is equally true of love, and friendship, and love 
of country, and delight in what they call the 
beauties of nature, and most other things worth 
having. Love, in particular, will not endure any 
historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across 
it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the 
world; but if you begin to ask what it was in 
other periods and countries, in Greece for in- 
stance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, 
and everything seems so vague and changing that 
a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy, at 
any rate, is one of the consequences of love; 
you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there 
it is. 



58 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we 
feel when we reflect on the past of those we love. 
A bundle of letters found after years of happy 
union creates no sense of insecurity in the pres- 
ent; and yet it will pain a man sharply. The 
two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each 
other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to 
the mind as something indelicate. To be alto- 
gether right, they should have had twin birth 
together, at the same moment with the feeling 
that unites them. Then indeed it would be simple 
and perfect and without reserve or afterthought. 
Then they would understand each other with a 
fulness impossible otherwise. There would be no 
barrier between them of associations that cannot 
be imparted. They would be led into none of 
those comparisons that send the blood back to 
the heart. And they would know that there had 
been no time lost, and they had been together as 
much as was possible. For besides terror for the 
separation that must follow some time or other 
in the future, men feel anger, and something like 
remorse, when they think of that other sepa- 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 59 

ration which endured until they met. Some one 
has written that love makes people believe in im- 
mortality, because there seems not to be room 
enough in life for so great a tenderness, and it is 
inconceivable that the most masterful of our emo- 
tions should have no more than the spare moments 
of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange; but if 
we call to mind analogies, we can hardly regard 
it as impossible. 

" The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from 
the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laugh- 
ingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting gener- 
ation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game 
dissolves and disappears into eternity from under 
his falling arrows ; this one is gone ere he is 
struck ; the other has but time to make one gesture 
and give one passionate cry; and they are all the 
things of a moment. When the generation is gone, 
when the play is over, when the thirty years' pan- 
orama has been withdrawn in tatters from the 
stage of the world, we may ask what has become 
of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and 
the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions 



60 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a 
few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth 
remembering, and a few children who have re- 
tained some happy stamp from the disposition of 
their parents. 






IV 

TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 

/4MONG sayings that have a currency in 
/^\ spite of being wholly false upon the face 
of them for the sake of a half-truth upon 
another subject which is accidentally combined with 
the error, one of the grossest and broadest con- 
veys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to 
tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heart- 
ily it were. But the truth is one; it has first to 
be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered. 
Even with instruments specially contrived for such 
a purpose — with a foot rule, a level, or a the- 
odolite — it is not easy to be exact ; it is easier, 
alas ! to be inexact. From those who mark 
the divisions on a scale to those who measure 
the boundaries of empires or the distance of the 
heavenly stars, it is by careful method and mi- 
nute, unwearying attention that men rise even to 



62 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

material exactness or to sure knowledge even of 
external and constant things. But it is easier to 
draw the outline of a mountain than the changing 
appearance of a face; and truth in human rela- 
tions is of this more intangible and dubious order : 
hard to seize, harder to communicate. Veracity 
to facts in a loose, colloquial sense — not to say 
that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of 
fact I was never out of England, not to say that 
I have read Cervantes in the original when as a 
matter of fact I know not one syllable of Spanish 
— this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree un- 
important in itself. Lies of this sort, according 
to circumstances, may or may not be important; 
in a certain sense even they may or may not be 
false. The habitual liar may be a very honest 
fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends; 
while another man who never told a formal false- 
hood in his life may yet be himself one lie — 
heart and face, from top to bottom. This is the 
kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice 
versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, 
truth to your own heart and your friends, never 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 6 3 

to feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth 
which makes love possible and mankind happy. 

L'art de bien dire is but a drawing-room ac- 
complishment unless it be pressed into the service 
of the truth. The difficulty of literature is not to 
write, but to write what you mean;^not to affect 
your reader, but to affect him precisely as you 
wish. This is commonly understood in the case of 
books or set orations; even in making your will, 
or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is ad- 
mitted by the world. But one thing you can never 
make Philistine natures understand; one thing, 
which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseiz- 
able to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics 
— namely, that the business of life is mainly 
carried on by means of this difficult art of litera- 
ture, and according to a man's proficiency in that 
art shall be the freedom and the fulness of his 
intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is sup- 
posed, can say what he means ; and, in spite of their 
notorious experience to the contrary, people so 
continue to suppose. Now, I simply open the 
last book I have been reading — Mr. Leland's 



64 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

captivating English Gipsies. " It is said," I find 
on p. 7, " that those who can converse with Irish 
peasants in their own native tongue form far 
higher opinions of their appreciation of the beau- 
tiful, and of the elements of humour and pathos 
in their hearts, than do those who know their 
thoughts only through the medium of English. I 
know from my own observations that this is quite 
the case with the Indians of North America, and 
it is unquestionably so with the gipsy." In short, 
where a man has not a full possession of the 
language, the most important, because the most 
amiable, qualities of his nature have to lie buried 
and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and 
the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very 
" elements of humour and pathos." Here is a man 
opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can 
put none of it out to interest in the market of 
affection! But what is thus made plain to our 
apprehensions in the case of a foreign language 
is partially true even with the tongue we 
learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak dif- 
ferent dialects; one shall be copious and exact, 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 6s 

another loose and meagre; but the speech of the 
ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth 
of fact — not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like 
a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's 
skin. And what is the result? That the one can 
open himself more clearly to his friends, and can 
enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable — 
intimacy with those he loves. An orator makes 
a false step ; he employs some trivial, some absurd, 
some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he 
insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring 
to charm ; in speaking to one sentiment he un- 
consciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you 
are not surprised, for you know his task to be 
delicate and filled with perils. " O frivolous mind 
of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when 
you seek to explain some misunderstanding or 
excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and 
addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not 
harnessing for a more perilous adventure ; as if 
yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an 
angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more 
easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent poli- 

5 



66 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ticians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten 
round ; the matters he discusses have been dis- 
cussed a thousand times before ; language is ready- 
shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and 
dry vocabulary. But you — may it not be that 
your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, 
not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to 
express which, like a pioneer, you must venture 
forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and 
become yourself a literary innovator? For even 
in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous 
acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung 
from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could 
read your heart, you may be sure that he would 
understand and pardon ; but, alas ! the heart cannot 
be shown — it has to be demonstrated in words. 
Do you think it is a hard thing to write poetry? 
Why, that is to write poetry, and of a high, if 
not the highest, order. 

I should even more admire " the lifelong and 
heroic literary labours " of my fellow-men, pa- 
tiently clearing up in words their loves and their 
contentions, and speaking their autobiography 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 67 

daily to their wives, were it not for a circum- 
stance which lessens their difficulty and my ad- 
miration by equal parts. For life, though largely, 
is not entirely carried on by literature. We are 
subject to physical passions and contortions; the 
voice breaks and changes, and speaks by uncon- 
scious and winning inflections; we have legible 
countenances, like an open book ; things that can- 
not be said look eloquently through the eyes ; and 
the soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, 
dwells ever on the threshold with appealing sig- 
nals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a 
flush or a paleness, are often the most clear re- 
porters of the heart, and speak more directly to 
the hearts of others. The message flies by these 
interpreters in the least space of time, and the 
misunderstanding is averted in the moment of 
its birth. To explain in words takes time and a 
just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs 
of a close relation, patience and justice are not 
qualities on which we can rely. But the look or 
the gesture explains things in a breath ; they tell 
their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, 



68 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

they cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach 
or an illusion that should steel your friend against 
the truth ; and then they have a higher authority, 
for they are the direct expression of the heart, 
not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and 
sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a 
letter to a friend which came near involving us 
in quarrel ; but we met, and in personal talk I re- 
peated the worst of what I had written, and added 
worse to that ; and with the commentary of the 
body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or 
say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes 
of intimacy ; an absence is a dead break in the 
relation ; yet two who know each other fully and 
are bent on perpetuity in love, may so preserve 
the attitude of their affections that they may meet 
on the same terms as they had parted. 

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read 
the face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot fol- 
low the changes of the voice. And there are 
others also to be pitied ; for there are some of 
an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been de- 
nied all the symbols of communication, who have 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 69 

neither a lively play of facial expression, nor 
speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet 
the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people truly 
made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which 
no one can undo. They are poorer than the 
gipsy, for their heart can speak no language un- 
der heaven. Such people we must learn slowly 
by the tenor of their acts, or through yea and 
nay communications ; or we take them on trust 
on the strength of a general air, and now and 
again, when we see the spirit breaking through 
in a flash, correct or change our estimate. But 
these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or 
freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief 
ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romanti- 
cally dull, despise physical endowments. That is 
a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like 
their fellow-creatures it must always be meaning- 
less; and, for my part, I can see few things more 
desirable, after the possession of such radical 
qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than 
to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to 
have looks to correspond with every feeling; to 



7 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

be elegant and delightful in person, so that we 
shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, 
and may never discredit speech with uncouth man- 
ners or become unconsciously our own burlesques. 
But of all unfortunates there is one creature (for 
I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfor- 
tune. This is he who has forfeited his birthright 
of expression, who has cultivated artful intona- 
tions, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet 
monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his 
means of communication with his fellow-men. The 
body is a house of many windows : there we all 
sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers- 
by to come and love us. But this fellow has filled 
his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured. 
His house may be admired for its design, the 
crowd may pause before the stained windows, but 
meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languish- 
ing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone. 

Truth of intercourse is something more diffi- 
cult than to refrain from open lies. It is possible 
to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth. It 
is not enough to answer formal questions. To 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 71 

reach the truth by yea and nay communications 
implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, 
such as is often found in mutual love. Yea and 
nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been 
related in the question. Many words are often 
necessary to convey a very simple statement; for 
in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the 
most that we can hope is by many arrows, more 
or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in 
the course of time, for what target we are aiming, 
and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to con- 
vey the purport of a single principle or a single 
thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker 
misses the point entirely, a wordy, prolegome- 
nous babbler will often add three new offences in 
the process of excusing one. It is really a most 
delicate affair. The world was made before the 
English language, and seemingly upon a different 
design. Suppose we held our converse not in 
words, but in music; those who have a bad ear 
would find themselves cut off from all near com- 
merce, and no better than foreigners in this big 
world. But we do not consider how many have 



72 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

" a bad ear " for words, nor how often the most 
eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners 
and questions ; there are so few that can be spoken 
to without a lie. " Do you forgive me? " Madam 
and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I 
have never yet been able to discover what forgive- 
ness means. "Is it still the same between us?" 
Why, how can it be? It is eternally different; and 
yet you are still the friend of my heart. "Do 
you understand me ? " God knows ; I should think 
it highly improbable. 

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A 
man may have sat in a room for hours and not 
opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room 
a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how 
many loves have perished because, from pride, or 
spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which 
withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, 
a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has 
but hung his head and held his tongue? And, 
again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth 
conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not 
always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 73 

as often happens in answer to a question, may be 
the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception ; 
but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you 
must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor 
of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each 
separate statement; the beginning and the end de- 
fine and travesty the intermediate conversation. 
You never speak to God; you address a fellow- 
man, full of his own tempers ; and to tell truth, 
rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, 
but to convey a true impression ; truth in spirit, 
not truth to letter, is the true veracity. To recon- 
cile averted friends a Jesuitical discretion is often 
needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to 
communicate sober truth. Women have an ill 
name in this connection; yet they live in as true 
relations ; the lie of a good woman is the true in- 
dex of her heart. 

" It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and 
most useful passage I remember to have read in 
any modern author, 1 " two to speak truth — one 

1 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Wednesday, 
p. 283. 



74 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

to speak and another to hear." He must be very 
little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, 
who does not recognise the fact. A grain of anger 
or a grain of suspicion produces strange acous- 
tical effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark 
offence. Hence we find those who have once 
quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever 
ready to break the truce. To speak truth there 
must be moral equality or else no respect ; and 
hence between parent and child intercourse is apt 
to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and mis- 
apprehensions to become ingrained. And there 
is another side to this, for the parent begins with 
an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed 
in early years or during the equinoctial gales of 
youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts 
which suit with his preconception ; and wherever 
a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at 
once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth. 
With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and 
still more between lovers (for mutual understand- 
ing is love's essence), the truth is easily indicated 
by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. 



V1RGINIBUS PUERISQUE 75 

A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist 
of long and delicate explanations; and where the 
life is known even yea and nay become luminous. 
In the closest of all relations — that of a love well 
founded and equally shared — speech is half dis- 
carded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a 
ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two com- 
municate directly by their presences, and with few 
looks and fewer words contrive to share their 
good and evil and uphold each other's hearts in 
joy. For love rests upon a physical basis ; it is a 
familiarity of nature's making and apart from vol- 
untary choice. Understanding has in some sort 
outrun knowledge, for the affection perhaps began 
with the acquaintance; and as it was not made 
like other relations, so it is not, like them, to be 
perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than 
can be uttered ; each lives by faith, and believes 
by a natural compulsion ; and between man and 
wife the language of the body is largely devel- 
oped and grown strangely eloquent. The thought 
that prompted and was conveyed in a caress 
would only lose to be set down in words — 



y6 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ay, although Shakespeare himself should be the 
scribe. 

Yet it is in these clear intimacies, beyond all 
others, that we must strive and do battle for the 
truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas ! all the pre- 
vious intimacy and confidence is but another charge 
against the person doubted. " What a monstrous 
dishonesty is this if I have been deceived so long 
and so completely! " Let but that thought gain 
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. 
Appeal to the past ; why, that is your crime ! 
Make all clear, convince the reason ; alas ! spe- 
ciousness is but a proof against you. " If you 
can abuse me now, the more likely that you have 
abused me from the first." 

For a strong affection such moments are worth 
supporting, and they will end well ; for your ad- 
vocate is in your lover's heart, and speaks her 
own language ; it is not you but she herself who 
can defend and clear you of the charge. But in 
slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union? 
Indeed, is it worth while? We are all incompris, 
only more or less concerned for the mischance ; all 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 77 

trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each 
other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Some- 
times we catch an eye — this is our opportunity 
in the ages — and we wag our tail with a poor 
smile. "Is that all?" All? If you only knew ! 
But how can they know? They do not love 
us ; the more fools we to squander life on the 
indifferent. 

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad 
to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to 
understand others that we can get our own hearts 
understood ; and in matters of human feeling the 
clement judge is the most successful pleader. 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

" You know my mother now and then argues very notably ; 
always very warmly at least. I happen 'often to differ from her; 
and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we very 
seldom are so happy as to convince one another. A pretty com- 
mon case, I believe, in all vehement debatings. She says, I am too 
witty; Anglice, too pert ; I, that she is too wise; that is to say, 
being likewise put into English, not so young as she has been!' — 
Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, Clarissa, vol. ii. Letter xiii. 

THERE is a strong feeling in favour of 
cowardly and prudential proverbs. The 
sentiments of a man while he is full of 
ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, 
with some qualification. But when the same per- 
son has ignominiously failed and begins to eat 
up his words, he should be listened to like an 
oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived 
for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them 
from ambitious attempts, and generally console 
them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre 
people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no 
doubt very properly so. But it does not follow 



AGE AND YOUTH 79 

that the one sort of proposition is any less true 
than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more 
praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Sam- 
uel Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one 
is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his 
counting-house counting out his money ; and 
doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, 
on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous 
sayings common to high races and natures, which 
set forth the advantage of the losing side, and 
proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living 
dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities 
reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. Ac- 
cording to the latter, every lad who goes to sea 
is an egregious ass ; never to forget your umbrella 
through a long life would seem a higher and wiser 
flight of achievement than to go smiling to the 
stake ; and so long as you are a bit of a coward 
and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the 
whole duty of man. 

It is a still more difficult consideration for our 
average men, that while all their teachers, from 
Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the 



8o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of 
manners, caution, and respectability, those char- 
acters in history who have most notoriously flown 
in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyper- 
bolical terms of praise, and honoured with public 
monuments in the streets of our commercial cen- 
tres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. 
You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but 
honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes 
of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the com- 
pany of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of 
France; surely a melancholy example for one's 
daughters! And then you have Columbus, who 
may have pioneered America, but, when all is 
said, was a most imprudent navigator. His life 
is not the kind of thing one would like to put 
into the hands of young people ; rather, one would 
do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, 
as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating in- 
fluence in life. The time would fail me if I were 
to recite all the big names in history whose ex- 
ploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking 
to the business mind. The incongruity is speak- 



AGE AND YOUTH 81 

ing; and I imagine it must engender among the 
mediocrities a very peculiar attitude towards the 
nobler and showier sides of national life. They 
will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much 
the same spirit as they assist at a performance of 
the Lyons Mail. Persons of substance take in the 
Times and sit composedly in pit or boxes accord- 
ing to the degree of their prosperity in business. 
As for the generals who go galloping up and 
down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats 
— as for the actors who raddle their faces and 
demean themselves for hire upon the stage — they 
must belong, thank God! to a different order of 
beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds 
careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read 
about like characters in ancient and rather fabu- 
lous annals. Our offspring would no more think 
of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of 
doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue 
in consequence of certain admissions in the first 
chapter of their school history of England. 

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly 
proverbs hold their own in theory;, and it is 



82 VIRG1NIBUS PUERISQUE 

another instance of the same spirit, that the opin- 
ions of old men about life have been accepted as 
final. All sorts of allowances are made for the 
illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for 
the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a 
good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the 
question logically, when an old gentleman wag- 
gles his head and says : " Ah, so I thought when 
I was your age." It is not thought an answer 
at all, if the young man retorts : " My venerable 
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am 
yours." And yet the one is as good as the 
other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an 
Oliver. 

" Opinion in good men," says Milton, " is but 
knowledge in the making." All opinions, prop- 
erly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It 
does not follow that a man will travel any fur- 
ther; but if he has really considered the world 
and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far 
This does not apply to formula? got by rote, 
which are stages on the road to nowhere but 
second childhood and the grave. To have a catch 



AGE AND YOUTH 83 

word in your mouth is not the same thing as to 
hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing 
as to have made one for yourself. There are too 
many of these catchwords in the world for people 
to rap out upon you like an oath and by way of 
an argument. They have a currency as intellec- 
tual counters; and many respectable persons pay 
their way with nothing else. They seem to' stand 
for vague bodies of theory in the background. 
The imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown 
arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as 
some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells 
in the constable's truncheon. They are used in 
pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin 
by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly 
serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion 
and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings. 
And when a young man comes to a certain stage 
of intellectual growth, the examination of these 
counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and 
fortifying to the mind. 

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed 
of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. 



84 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

They were very good places to pass through, and 
I am none the less at my destination. All my 
old opinions were only stages on the way to the 
one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the 
way to something else. I am no more abashed 
at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea 
of my own than at having been a sucking infant. 
Doubtless the world is quite right in a million 
ways; but you have to be kicked about a little 
to convince you of the fact. And in the mean- 
while you must do something, be something, be- 
lieve something. It is not possible to keep the 
mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; 
and even if you could do so, instead of coming 
ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be 
very apt to remain in a state of balance and 
blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate 
stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to 
be ashamed of in the retrospect : if St. Paul had 
not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have 
been a colder Christian. For my part, I look 
back to the time when I was a Socialist with 
something like regret. I have convinced myself 



AGE AND YOUTH 85 

(for the moment) that we had better leave these 
great changes to what we call great blind forces; 
their blindness being so much more perspicacious 
than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men. 
I seem to see that my own scheme would not 
answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard 
propounded would depress some elements of good- 
ness just as much as they encouraged others. Now 
I know that in thus turning Conservative with 
years, I am going through the normal cycle of 
change and travelling in the common orbit of 
men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would sub- 
mit to gout or grey hair, as a concomitant of 
growing age or else of failing animal heat; but 
I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change 
for the better — I dare say it is deplorably for the 
worse. I have no choice in the business, and can 
no more resist this tendency of my mind than I 
could prevent my body from beginning to totter 
and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) 
I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires ; 
but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the 
time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity. 



86 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

"Just in the same way, I do not greatly pride my- 
self on having outlived my belief in the fairy 
tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their 
own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, 
and suspicious. Whether from the growth of 
experience or the decline of animal heat, I see 
that age leads to these and certain other faults; 
arid it follows, of course, that while in one sense 
I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in 
another I am indubitably posting towards these 
forms and sources of error. 

As we go catching and catching at this or 
that corner of knowledge, now getting a fore- 
sight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a 
glimpse of prudence, we may compare the head- 
long course of our years to a swift torrent in 
which a man is carried away; now he is dashed 
against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment 
to a trailing spray ; at the end, he is hurled out 
and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. 
We have no more than glimpses and touches ; we 
are torn away from our theories; we are spun 
round and round and shown this or the other 



AGE AND YOUTH 87 

view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold 
to their opinions. We take a sight at a condi- 
tion in life, and say we have studied it; our most 
elaborate view is no more than an impression. 
If we had breathing space, we should take the 
occasion to modify and adjust; but at this break- 
neck hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are 
adult, no sooner in love than married or jilted, 
no sooner one age than we begin to be another, 
and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood 
than we begin to decline towards the grave. It 
is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear 
and stable views in a medium so perturbed and 
fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which 
things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with 
a pistol to our head; we are confronted with a 
new set of conditions on which we have not only 
to pass a judgment, but to take action, before 
the hour is at an end. And we cannot even 
regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of 
things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual 
variation ; and not infrequently we find our own 
disguise the strangest in the masquerade. In the 



88 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

course of time, we grow to love things we hated 
and hate things we loved. Milton is not so dull 
as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amus- 
ing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and 
not nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use 
pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide 
and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our at- 
tributes are modified or changed; and it will be 
a poor account of us if our views do not modify 
and change in a proportion. To hold the same 
views at forty as we held at twenty is to have 
been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, 
not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well 
birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship 
captain should sail to India from the Port of 
London ; and having brought a chart of the 
Thames on deck at his first setting out, should 
obstinately use no other for the whole voyage. 

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to 
begin at Gravesend with a chart 6f the Red Sea. 
Si Jcimcssc savait, si Vicillesse pouvait, is a very 
pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In 
five cases out of ten, it is not so much that the 



AGE AND YOUTH 89 

young people do not - know, as that they do not 
choose. There is something irreverent in the 
speculation, but perhaps the want of power has 
more to do with the wise resolutions of age than 
we are always willing to admit. It would be an 
instructive experiment to make an old man young 
again and leave him all his savoir. I scarcely 
think he would put his money in the Savings 
Bank after all ; I doubt if he would be such an 
admirable son as we are led to expect ; and as 
for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would 
out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new 
compeers to the blush. Prudence is a wooden 
Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin 
walks with the portly air of a high priest, and 
after whom dances many a successful merchant 
in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity 
to cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any 
considerable age, it cannot be denied that he la- 
ments his imprudences, but I notice he often 
laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with 
a more genuine intonation. 

It is customary to say that age should be con- 



9 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

sidered, because it comes last. It seems just as 
much to the point, that youth comes first. And 
the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to 
add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes 
at all. Disease and accident make short work 
of even the most prosperous persons; death costs 
nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an 
inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be 
suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious 
schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a 
man has been grudging himself his own life in 
the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the 
festival that was never to be, it becomes that 
hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on 
the confines of farce. The victim is dead — and 
lie has cunningly overreached himself: a combina- 
tion of calamities none the less absurd for being 
grim. To husband a favourite claret until the 
batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of 
policy; and how much more with a whole cellar 
— a whole bodily existence ! People may lay down 
their lives with cheerfulness in the sure expecta- 
tion of a blessed immortality; but that is a dif- 



AGE AND YOUTH 91 

fcrent affair from giving up youth with all its 
admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better qual- 
ity of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, 
more than improbable, old age. We should not 
compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a 
whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the 
dessert, before he knew whether there was to be 
any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as 
imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. 
We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and peril- 
ous waters ; and to take a cue from the dolorous 
old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaidens 
singing, and know that we shall never see dry 
land any more. Old and young, we are all on 
our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco 
among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, 
and let us have a pipe before we go! 

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous 
preparation for old age is only trouble thrown 
away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a 
friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is 
down and the west faded, the heavens begin to 
fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a 



92 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted 
for the violent ups and downs of passion and 
disgust; the same influence that restrains our 
hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures 
are less intense, the troubles are milder and more 
tolerable; and in a word, this period for which 
we are asked to hoard up everything as for a 
time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, 
easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing 
its own work and following its own happy in- 
spiration, youth is doing the best it can to endow 
the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is your 
only prelude to a self-contained and independent 
age; and the muff inevitably develops into the 
bore. There are not many Dr. Johnsons, to 
set forth upon their first romantic voyage at 
sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or 
visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go 
down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we 
must be about it while we are still young. It 
will not do to delay until we are clogged with 
prudence and limping with rheumatism, and 
people begin to ask us : " What does Gravity out 



AGE AND YOUTH 93 

of bed? " Youth is the time to go flashing from 
one end of the world to the other both in mind 
and body; to try the manners of different na- 
tions; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see 
sunrise in town and country; to be converted at 
a revival ; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, 
write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and 
wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Her- 
nani. There is some meaning in the old theory 
about wild oats ; and a man who has not had 
his green-sickness and got done with it for good, 
is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated 
infant. " It is extraordinary," says Lord Beacons- 
field, one of the brightest and best preserved of 
youths up to the date of his last novel, 1 " it 
is extraordinary how hourly and how violently 
change the feelings of an inexperienced young 
man." And this mobility is a special talent en- 
trusted to his care; a sort of indestructible vir- 
ginity ; a magic armour, with which he can pass 
unhurt through great dangers and come unbe- 
daubed out of the miriest passages. Let him 

1 Lothair. 



94 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that 
he may ; his soul has as many lives as a cat, he 
will live in all weathers, and never be a half- 
penny the worse. Those who go to the devil in 
youth, with anything like a fair chance, were 
probably little worth saving from the first; they 
must have been feeble fellows — creatures made 
of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire, 
anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; 
we may sympathise with their parents, but there 
is not much cause to go into mourning for them- 
selves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother 
is the worst of mankind. 

When the old man waggles his head and says, 
" Ah, so I thought when I was your age," he 
has proved the youth's case. Doubtless, whether 
from growth of experience or decline of animal 
heat, he thinks so no longer ; but he thought so 
while he was young; and all men have thought 
so while they were young, since there was dew 
in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is 
another young man adding his vote to those of 
previous generations and rivetting another link 



AGE AND YOUTH 9S 

to the chain of testimony. It is as natural and 
as right for a young man to be imprudent and 
exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and 
beat about his cage like any other wild thing 
newly captured, as it is for old men to turn grey, 
or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to 
die for something worthier than their lives. 

By way of an apologue for the aged, when 
they feel more than usually tempted to offer their 
advice, let me recommend the following little tale. 
A child who had been remarkably fond of toys 
(and in particular of lead soldiers) found himself 
growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood 
without any abatement of this childish taste. He 
was thirteen; already he had been taunted for 
dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to 
blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; 
the shades of the prison-house were closing about 
him with a vengeance. There is nothing more 
difficult than to put the thoughts of children into 
the language of their elders; but this is the effect 
of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," 
he said, " I must give up my playthings, in the 



96 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure 
myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I 
am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; 
all people give them up out of the same pusil- 
lanimous respect for those who are a little older; 
and if they do not return to them as soon as 
they can, it is only because they grow stupid and 
forget. I shall be wiser; I shall conform for a 
little to the ways of their foolish world; but so 
soon as I have made enough money, I shall re- 
tire and shut myself up among my playthings 
until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing 
in the train along the Esterel mountains between 
Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a pretty house 
in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and 
decided that this should be his Happy Valley. 
Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! 
The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, 
not unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the 
reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely 
to be carried into effect. There was a worm in 
the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Child- 
hood must pass away, and then youth, as surely 






AGE AND YOUTH 97 

as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be 
always seasonable, and to change with a good 
grace in changing circumstances. To love play- 
things well as a child, to lead an adventurous 
and honourable youth, and to settle, when the 
time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to 
be a good artist in life and deserve w r ell of your- 
self and your neighbour. 

You need repent none of your youthful vaga- 
ries. They may have been over the score on one 
side, just as those of age are probably over the 
score on the other. But they had a point ; they 
not only befitted your age and expressed its at- 
titude and passions, but they had a relation to 
what was outside of you, and implied criticisms 
on the existing state of things, which you need 
not allow to have been undeserved, because you 
now see that they were partial. All error, not 
merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that 
the current truth is incomplete. The follies of 
youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much 
as the embarrassing questions put by babes and 
sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the 

7 



98 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps 
the man against a boulder, you must expect him 
to scream, and you need not be surprised if the 
scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing 
at the Church of England, discovered the cure 
of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads, 
irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing 
for it but the abolishment of everything and 
Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young 
fool ; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. 
But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It 
is better to emit a scream in the shape of a 
theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars 
and incongruities of life and take everything as 
it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people 
swallow the universe like a pill ; they travel on 
through the world, like smiling images pushed 
from behind. For God's sake give me the young 
man who has brains enough to make a fool of 
himself! As for the others, the irony of facts 
shall take it out of their hands, and make fools 
of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be 
over. There shall be such a mopping and a 



AGE AND YOUTH 99 

mowing at the last day, and such blushing and 
confusion of countenance for all those who have 
been wise in their own esteem, and have not 
learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to 
age. If we are indeed here to perfect and com- 
plete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, 
and more sympathetic against some nobler career 
in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to 
the utmost while we have the time. To equip 
a dull, respectable person with wings would be 
but to make a parody of an angel. 

In short, if youth is not quite right in its 
opinions, there is a strong probability that age 
is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler 
of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A 
man finds he has been wrong at every preceding 
stage of his career, only to deduce the astonish- 
ing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. 
Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon 
the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. 
Since we have explored the maze so long without 
result, it follows, for poor human reason, that 
we cannot have to explore much longer; close by 



ioo VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon 
and a piece of ornamental water. How if there 
were no centre at all, but just one alley after 
another, and the whole world a labyrinth without 
end or issue? 

I overheard the other day a scrap of conver- 
sation, which I take the liberty to reproduce. 
" What I advance is true," said one. " But not 
the whole truth," answered the other. " Sir," 
returned the first (and it seemed to me there 
was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), 
" Sir, there is no such thing as the whole truth ! " 
Indeed, there is nothing so evident in life as that 
there are two sides to a question. History is 
one long illustration. The forces of nature are 
engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our 
backward intelligences. We never pause for a 
moment's consideration, but we admit it as an 
axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity exactly 
by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it 
into our ears that this or that question has only 
one possible solution ; and your enthusiast is a 
fine florid fellow, dominates things for awhile and 



AGE AND YOUTH 101 

shakes the world out of a cloze; but when once 
he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential 
people set to work to remind us of the other side 
and demolish the generous imposture. While 
Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his 
Institutes, and hot-headed Knox is thundering in 
the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the 
other side in his library in Perigord, and pre- 
dicting that they will find as much to quarrel 
about in the Bible as they had found already in 
the Church. Age may have one side, but as- 
suredly Youth has the other. There is nothing 
more certain than that both are right, except 
perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to 
differ; for who knows but what agreeing to dif- 
fer may not be a form of agreement rather than 
a form of difference? 

I suppose it is written that any one who sets 
up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict 
himself to his very face. For here have I fairly 
talked myself into thinking that we have the 
whole thing before us at last; that there is no 
answer to the mystery, except that there are as 



102 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

many as you please; that there is no centre to the 
maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre 
is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with 
every ceremony of politeness, is the only " one 
undisturbed song of pure concent " to which we 
are ever likely to lend our musical vioces. 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

" Boswell : We grow weary when idle. 

"Johnson: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want 
company ; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary ; 
we should all entertain one another." 

JUST now, when every one is bound, under 
pain of a decree in absence convicting them 
of /^-respectability, to enter on some lu- 
crative profession, and labour therein with some- 
thing not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the 
opposite party who are content when they have 
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the mean- 
while, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. 
And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, 
which does not consist in doing nothing, but in 
doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic 
formularies of the ruling class, has as good a 
right to state its position as industry itself. It 
is admitted that the presence of people who refuse 
to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny 



io4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment 
for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so 
many) takes his determination, votes for the six- 
pences, and in the emphatic Americanism, " goes 
for " them. And while such an one is ploughing 
distressfully up the road, it is not hard to under- 
stand his resentment, when he perceives cool per- 
sons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with 
a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their 
elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate 
place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was 
the glory of having taken Rome for these tu- 
multuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate 
house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and 
unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to 
have laboured along and scaled the arduous hill- 
tops, and when all is done, find humanity indif- 
ferent to your achievement. Hence physicists 
condemn the unphysical ; financiers have only a 
superficial toleration for those who know little of 
stocks ; literary persons despise the unlettered ; 
and people of all pursuits combine to disparage 
those who have none. 






APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 105 

But though this is One difficulty of the subject, 
it is not the greatest. You coulcl not be put in 
prison for speaking against industry, but you can 
be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The 
greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them 
well ; therefore, please to remember this is an 
apology. It is certain that much may be judi- 
ciously argued in favour of diligence; only there 
is something to be said against it, and that is what, 
on the present occasion, I have to say. To state 
one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all 
others, and that a man has written a book of 
travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should 
never have been to Richmond. 

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should 
be a good deal idle in youth. For though here 
and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from 
school honours with all his wits about him, most 
boys pay so dear for their medals that they never 
afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin 
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true 
during all the time a lad is educating himself, or 
suffering: others to educate him. It must have 



106 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed 
Johnson at Oxford in these words : " Young man, 
ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock 
of knowledge; for when years come upon you, 
you will find that poring upon books will be but 
an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to 
have been unaware that many other things be- 
sides reading grow irksome, and not a few become 
impossible, by the time a man has to use spec- 
tacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books 
are good enough in their own way, but they are 
a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems 
a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering 
into a mirror, with your back turned on all the 
bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads 
very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will 
have little time for thoughts. 

If you look back on your own education, I am 
sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours 
of truantry that you regret; you would rather 
cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and 
waking in the class. For my own part, I have 
attended a good many lectures in my time. I still 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 107 

remember that the spinning of a top is a case of 
Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphy- 
teusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But 
though I would not willingly part with such scraps 
of science, I do not set the same store by them 
as by certain other odds and ends that I came by 
in the open street while I was playing truant. 
This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty 
place of education, which was the favourite school 
of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly 
many inglorious masters in the Science of the 
Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this : if a lad 
does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no 
faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in 
the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by 
the gardened suburbs into the country. He may 
pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke 
innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on 
the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And 
there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, 
and see things in a new perspective. Why, if 
this be not education, what is? We may con- 
ceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an 



io8 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

one, and the conversation that should thereupon 
ensue : — 

" How now, young fellow, what dost thou 
here?" 

: ' Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 

" Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st 
thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the 
end thou mayest obtain knowledge?" 

" Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, 
by your leave." 

" Learning, quotha ! After what fashion, I 
pray thee ? Is it mathematics ? " 

" No, to be sure." 

"Is it metaphysics?" 

" Nor that." 

" Is it some language ? " 

" Nay, it is no language." 

"Is it a trade?" 

" Nor a trade neither." 

"Why, then, what is't?" 

" Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me 
to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note 
what is commonly done by persons in my case, 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 109 

and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets 
on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff 
is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by 
this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson 
which my master teaches me to call Peace, or 
Contentment." 

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much 
commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with 
a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this 
wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would 
have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman ! " 

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his 
cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when 
it spread its feathers. 

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common 
opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece 
of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your 
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some 
acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; 
or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; 
and the workhouse is too good for you. It is 
supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a 
well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, 



no VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

as he grew older, came to regard all experience 
as a single great book, in which to study for a few 
years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to 
him whether you should read in Chapter xx., 
which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter 
xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the 
gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, 
looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his 
ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will 
get more true education than many another in a 
life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill 
and arid knowledge to be found upon the sum- 
mits of formal and laborious science; but it is 
all round about you, and for the trouble of look- 
ing, that you will acquire the warm and palpi- 
tating facts of life. While others are filling their 
memory with a lumber of words, one-half of 
which they will forget before the week be out, 
your truant may learn some really useful art : to 
play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak 
with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. 
Many who have " plied their book diligently," and 
know all about some one branch or another of 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS in 

accepted lore, come out of the study with an 
ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, 
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and 
brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, 
who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to 
the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who 
began life along with them — by your leave, a 
different picture. He has had time to take care 
of his health and his spirits; he has been a great 
deal in the open air, which is the most salutary 
of all things for both body and mind ; and if he has 
never read the great Book in very recondite places, 
he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to 
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford 
some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of 
his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's know- 
ledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, 
and the idler has another and more important 
quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who 
has much looked on at the childish satisfaction 
of other people in their hobbies, will regard his 
own with only a very ironical indulgence. He 
will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will 



ii2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of 
people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the- 
way truths, he will identify himself with no very 
burning falsehood. His way takes him along a 
by-road, not much frequented, but very even and 
pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and 
leads to the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence 
he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble 
prospect; and while others behold the East and 
West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be con- 
tentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon 
all sublunary things, with an army of shadows 
running speedily and in many different directions 
into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows 
and the generations, the shrill doctors and the 
plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and 
emptiness ; but underneath all this, a man may 
see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green 
and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; 
good people laughing, drinking, and making love 
as they did before the Flood or the French Revo- 
lution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under 
the hawthorn. 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 113 

Extreme busyness, whether at school or col- 
lege, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient 
vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a 
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal 
identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hack- 
neyed people about, who are scarcely conscious 
of living except in the exercise of some conven- 
tional occupation. Bring these fellows into the 
country, or set them aboard ship, and you will 
see how they pine for their desk or their study. 
They have no curiosity; they cannot give them- 
selves over to random provocations; they do not 
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for 
its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about 
them with a stick, they will even stand still. It 
is no good speaking to such folk : they cannot be 
idle, their nature is not generous enough ; and they 
pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not 
dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. 
When they do not require to go to the office, when 
they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, 
the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If 
they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they 



ii 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To 
see them, you would suppose there was nothing 
to look at and no one to speak with; you would 
imagine they were paralysed or alienated ; and 
yet very possibly they are hard workers in their 
own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in 
a deed or a turn of the market. They have been 
to school and college, but all the time they had their 
eye on the medal; they have gone about in the 
world and mixed with clever people, but all the 
time they were thinking of their own affairs. As 
if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, 
they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life 
of all work and no play ; until here they are at 
forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all 
material of amusement, and not one thought to 
rub against another, while they wait for the train. 
Before he was breeched, he might have clambered 
on the boxes ; when he was twenty, he would have 
stared at the girls ; but now the pipe is smoked out, 
the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt 
upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This 
does not appeal to me as being Success in Life. 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 115 

But it is not only the person himself who suf- 
fers from his busy habits, but his wife and chil- 
dren, his friends and relations, and down to the 
very people he sits with in a railway carriage or 
an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man 
calls his business, is only to be sustained by per- 
petual neglect of many other things. And it is not 
by any means certain that a man's business is the 
most important thing he has to do. To an im- 
partial estimate it will seem clear that many of the 
wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts 
that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life 
are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, 
among the world at large, as phases of idleness. 
For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentle- 
men, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers 
in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap 
their hands from the benches, do really play a 
part and fulfil important offices towards the gen- 
eral result. You are no doubt very dependent 
on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the 
guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly 
from place to place, and the policemen who walk 



n6 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

the streets for your protection; but is there not 
a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain 
other benefactors who set you smiling when they 
fall in your way, or season your dinner with 
good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose 
his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly 
trick of borrowing shirts ; and yet they were bet- 
ter people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And 
though Falstaff was neither sober nor very hon- 
est, I think I could name one or two long-faced 
Barabbases whom the world could better have 
done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more 
sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never 
done him anything he could call a service, than 
to his whole circle of ostentatious friends ; for he 
thought a good companion emphatically the great- 
est benefactor. I know there are people in the 
world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour 
has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. 
But this is a churlish disposition. A man may 
send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the 
most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half 
an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 117 

article of his; do you think the service would be 
greater, if he had made the manuscript in his 
heart's blood, like a compact with the devil? Do 
you really fancy you should be more beholden to 
your correspondent, if he had been damning you 
all the while for your importunity? Pleasures are 
more beneficial than duties because, like the qual- 
ity of mercy, they are not strained, and they are 
twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, 
and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever 
there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is 
conferred with pain, and, among generous people, 
received with confusion. There is no duty we so 
much underrate as the duty of being happy. By 
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon 
the world, which remain unknown even to our- 
selves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody 
so much as the benefactor. The other day, a rag- 
ged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a 
marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one 
he passed into a good-humour; one of these per- 
sons, who had been delivered from more than 
usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow 



n8 VIRGINIBUS PUER1SQUE . 

and gave him some money with this remark : 
" You see what sometimes comes of looking 
pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he 
had now to look both pleased and mystified. For 
my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling 
rather than tearful children ; I do not wish to pay 
for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am 
prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. 
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find 
than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating 
focus of good-will ; and their entrance into a room 
is as though another candle had been lighted. We 
need not care whether they could prove the forty- 
seventh proposition; they do a better thing than 
that, they practically demonstrate the great The- 
orem of the Liveableness of Life. Consequently, 
if a person cannot be happy without remaining 
idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary 
precept ; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, 
one not easily to be abused; and within practical 
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths 
in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of 
your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 119 

you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he 
puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and 
receives a large measure of nervous derangement 
in return. Either he absents himself entirely from 
all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with 
carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes 
among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction 
of his whole nervous system, to discharge some 
temper before he returns to work. I do not care 
how much or how well he works, this fellow is an 
evil feature in other people's lives. They would 
be happier if he were dead. They could easier 
do without his services in the Circumlocution 
Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. 
He poisons life at the well-head. It is better 
to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace 
nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish 
uncle. 

And what, in God's name, is all this pother 
about? For what cause do they embitter their 
own and other people's lives? That a man should 
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he 
should finish or not finish his great allegorical pic- 



120 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ture, are questions of little interest to the world. 
The ranks of life are full ; and although a thousand 
fall, there are always some to go into the breach. 
When they told Joan of Arc she should be at 
home minding women's work, she answered there 
were plenty to spin, and wash. And so, even 
with your own rare. gifts! When nature is "so 
careless of the single life," why should we coddle 
ourselves into the fancy that our own is of ex- 
ceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had 
been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir 
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have 
wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the 
well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his 
book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. 
There are not many works extant, if you look 
the alternative all over, which are worth the price 
of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. 
This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of 
our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, 
upon consideration, . find no great cause for per- 
sonal vainglory in the phrase; for although to- 



APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 121 

bacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities 
necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor pre- 
cious in themselves. Alas and alas ! you may 
take it how you will, but the services of no single 
individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a 
gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And 
yet you see merchants who go and labour them- 
selves into a great fortune and thence into the 
bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling 
at little articles until their temper is a cross to 
all who come about them, as though Pharaoh 
should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of 
a pyramid ; and fine young men who work them- 
selves into a decline, and are driven off in a 
hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you 
not suppose these persons had been whispered, by 
the, Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some 
momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bul- 
let on which they play their farces was the bull's- 
eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet 
it is not so. The ends for which they give away 
their priceless 'youth, for all they know, may be 



122 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches they 
expect may never come, or may find them indif- 
ferent; and they and the world they inhabit are 
so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the 
thought. 



ORDERED SOUTH 

BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which 
we are sent when health deserts us are 
often singularly beautiful. Often, too, 
they are places we have visited in former years, 
or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever after- 
wards in pious memory; and we please ourselves 
with the fancy that we shall repeat many vivid 
and pleasurable sensations, and take up again the 
thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we 
let it fall. We shall now have an opportunity 
of finishing many pleasant excursions, interrupted 
of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. 
It may be that we have kept in mind, during all 
these years, the recollection of some valley into 
which we have just looked down for a moment 
before we lost sight of it in the disorder of the 
hills ; it may be that we have lain awake at night, 
and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought 



i2 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of corners we had never turned, or summits we 
had all but climbed : we shall now be able, as we 
tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished 
pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that con- 
fined our recollections. 

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily 
led away when hope and memory are both in one 
story, that I dare say the sick man is not very 
inconsolable when he receives sentence of banish- 
ment, and is inclined to regard his ill-health as not 
the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he 
immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the 
journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with 
him as he tries to sleep between two days of noisy 
progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves 
into something of their old quickness and sensi- 
bility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal 
splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and 
plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful 
glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds 
of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into 
withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the 
admirable brevity and simplicity of such little 



ORDERED SOUTH 125 

glimpses of country and country ways as flash 
upon him through the windows of the train; little 
glimpses that have a character all their own ; sights 
seen as a travelling swallow might see them from 
the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land 
on some Olympian errand. Here and there, in- 
deed, a few children huzzah and wave their hands 
to the express; but for the most part, it is an in- 
terruption too brief and isolated to attract much 
notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; a 
girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal- 
boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or 
the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to 
overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these 
hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have 
been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and 
there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the 
averted head, to indicate that she has been even 
conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the 
chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is 
so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes 
through which it takes us, that our heart becomes 
full of the placidity and stillness of the country; 



i26 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

and while the body is borne forward in the flying 
chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the 
humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; 
they make haste up the poplar alley that leads 
towards the town; they are left behind with the 
signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he 
watches the long train sweep away into the golden 
distance. 

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the 
shock of wonder and delight with which he will 
learn that he has passed the indefinable line that 
separates South from North. And this is an un- 
certain moment; for sometimes the consciousness 
is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some 
slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; 
and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he 
wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping 
through the persiennes, and the southern patois 
confusedly audible below the windows. Whether 
it come early or late, however, this pleasure will 
not end with the anticipation, as do so many others 
of the same family. It will leave him wider 
awake than it found him, and give a new signifi- 



ORDERED SOUTH 127 

cance to all he may see for many days to come. 
There is something in the mere name of the South 
that carries enthusiasm along with it. At the 
sound of the word, he pricks up his ears; he be- 
comes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get 
by heart the permanent lines and character of the 
landscape, as if he had been told that it was all 
his own — an estate out of which he had been 
kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive 
in free and full possession. Even those who have 
never been there before feel as if they had been; 
and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for 
the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of 
recognition, that one would think they were com- 
ing home after a weary absence, instead of travel- 
ling hourly farther abroad. 

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled 
down in his chosen corner, that the invalid begins 
to understand the change that has befallen him. 
Everything about him is as he had remembered, 
or as he had anticipated. Here, at his feet, under 
his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea. 
Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of 



128 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

form of the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, 
not even the crude curves of the railway, can 
utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay 
after another along the whole reach of the Riviera. 
And of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge 
that is divorced from enjoyment. He recognises 
with his intelligence that this thing and that thing 
is beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to 
confess that it is not beautiful for him. It is in 
vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain 
that he chooses out points of view, and stands 
there, looking with all his eyes, and waiting for 
some return of the pleasure that he remembers 
in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited 
the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda. 
He is like an enthusiast leading about with him 
a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one 
by who is out of sympathy with the scene, and is 
not moved up to the measure of the occasion ; and 
that some one is himself. The world is disen- 
chanted for him. He seems to himself to touch 
things with muffled hands, and to see them 
through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fum- 



ORDERED SOUTH 129 

bling after notes that are silent when he has 
found and struck them. He cannot recognise 
that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body 
with which he now goes burthened, is the same 
that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate 
and alive. 

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very 
softness and amenity of the climate, and to fancy 
that in the rigours of the winter at home, these 
dead emotions would revive and flourish. A 
longing for the brightness and silence of fallen 
snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick 
for the hale rough weather; for the tracery of 
the frost upon his window-panes at morning, the 
reluctant descent of the first flakes, and the white 
roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet 
the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is 
of the flimsiest : if but the thermometer fall a 
little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or 
a wind come down from the snow-clad Alps be- 
hind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the 
instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim 
wintry streets at home returns to him, and begins 

9 



130 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

to haunt his memory. The hopeless, huddled at- 
titude of tramps in doorways ; the flinching gait 
of barefoot children on the icy pavement ; the sheen 
of the rainy streets towards afternoon ; the meagre 
anatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of 
wet garments; the high canorous note of the 
North-easter on days when the very houses seem 
to stiffen with cold : these, and such as these, crowd 
back upon him, and mockingly substitute them- 
selves for the fanciful winter scenes with which he 
had pleased himself awhile before. He cannot be 
glad enough that he is where he is. If only the 
others could be there also ; if only those tramps 
could lie down for a little in the sunshine, and 
those children warm their feet, this once, upon 
a kindlier earth ; if only there were no cold 
anywhere, and no nakedness, and no hunger; if 
only it were as well with all men as it is with 
him ! 

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, 
after all. If it is only rarely that anything pene- 
trates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when 
anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all 



ORDERED SOUTH 131 

the more poignant for its very rarity. There is 
something pathetic in these occasional returns of 
a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he 
will be stirred and awakened by many such; and 
they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; 
as a friend once said to me, the " spirit of de- 
light " comes often on small wings. For the 
pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essen- 
tially capricious. It comes sometimes when we 
least look for it ; and sometimes, when we expect 
it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly 
for days together, in the very home-land of the 
beautiful. We may have passed a place a thou- 
sand times and one ; and on the thousand and 
second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in 
a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle 
of surroundings ; so that we see it " with a child's 
first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils 
by the lake-side. And if this falls out capri- 
ciously with the healthy, how much more so with 
the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, 
and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy 
the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and 



132 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and 
odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may- 
see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit 
of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of 
flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an 
olive garden ; and something significant or monu- 
mental in the grouping, something in the harmony 
of faint colour that is always characteristic of the 
dress of these southern women, will come home 
to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that sat- 
isfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are 
the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or 
it may be something even slighter : as when the 
opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets 
lost and fails to produce its effect on the large 
scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance 
isolation — as he changes the position of his sun- 
shade — of a yard or two of roadway with its 
stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to 
the infinite variety of the olive yards themselves. 
Even the colour is indeterminate and continually 
shifting: now you would say it was green, now 
grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 






ORDERED SOUTH 133 

" cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinct- 
ness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea 
of foliage is shaken and broken up with little 
momentary silverings and shadows. But every 
one sees the world in his own way. To some 
the glad moment may have arrived on other pro- 
vocations ; and their recollection may be most 
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying bur- 
thens on their heads ; of tropical effects with canes 
and naked rock and sunlight ; of the relief of 
cypresses ; of the troubled, busy-looking groups 
of sea-pines, that seem always as if they were 
being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind ; 
of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, 
over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of 
the empurpled hills standing up, solemn and 
sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at 
evening. 

There go many elements, without doubt, to 
the making of one such moment of intense per- 
ception ; and it is on the happy agreement of these 
many elements, on the harmonious vibration of 
many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment 



134 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

must depend. Who can forget how, when he has 
chanced upon some attitude of complete restful- 
ness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass 
or heather, the whole fashion of the landscape 
has been changed for him, as though the sun had 
just broken forth, or a great artist had only then 
completed, by some cunning touch, the composi- 
tion of the picture? And not only a change of 
posture — a snatch of perfume, the sudden sing- 
ing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air 
from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a trav- 
elling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little 
shiver along the most infinitesimal nerve of a 
man's body — not one of the least of these but 
has a hand somehow in the general effect, and 
brings some refinement of its own into the char- 
acter of the pleasure we feel. 

And if the external conditions are thus varied 
and subtle, even more so are those within our 
own bodies. No man can find out the world, says 
Solomon, from beginning to end, because the 
world is in his heart ; and so it is impossible for 
any of us to understand, from beginning to end, 



ORDERED SOUTH 135 

that agreement of harmonious circumstances that 
creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, 
precisely because some of these circumstances are 
hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our 
own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that 
we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to 
be taken into account some sensibility more deli- 
cate than usual in the nerves affected, or some 
exquisite refinement in the architecture of the 
brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beauti- 
ful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing 
or sight. We admire splendid views and great 
pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather 
the mind within us, that gathers together these 
scattered details for its delight, and makes out of 
certain colours, certain distributions of graduated 
light and darkness, that intelligible whole which 
alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relat- 
ing in one of his essays how he went on foot 
from one great man's house to another's in search 
of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over 
these noble and wealthy owners, because he was 
more capable of enjoying their costly possessions 



136 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

than they were; because they had paid the money 
and he had received the pleasure. And the oc- 
casion is a fair one for self-complacency. While 
the one man was working to be able to buy the 
picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy 
the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been 
diligently improved in either case; only the one 
man has made for himself a fortune, and the other 
has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair 
occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the 
event shows a man to have chosen the better part, 
and laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, 
than those who have credit for most wisdom. 
And yet even this is not a good unmixed ; and like 
all other possessions, although in a less degree, 
the possession of a brain that has been thus im- 
proved and cultivated, and made into the prime 
organ of a man's enjoyment, brings with it cer- 
tain inevitable cares and disappointments. The 
happiness of such an one comes to depend greatly 
upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten 
and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. 
And thus a degree of nervous prostration, tliat 



ORDERED SOUTH 137 

to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is 
enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric 
of his life, to take, except at rare moments, 
the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him 
wherever he goes with failure, and the sense 
of want, and disenchantment of the world and 
life. 

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that 
the life of the invalid resembles a premature old 
age. Those excursions that he had promised him- 
self to finish, prove too long or too arduous for 
his feeble body ; and the barrier-hills are as im- 
passable as ever. Many a white town that sits 
far out on the promontory, many a comely fold 
of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures 
his imagination day after day, and is yet as in- 
accessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of 
the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon 
him wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts 
and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, 
he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his 
weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant 
and familiar to him as the cell to a contented 



138 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the 
mid race of active life, he now falls out of the 
little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters 
of the sanatorium. He sees the country people 
come and go about their everyday affairs, the 
foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; 
the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he 
suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner; and 
he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of 
interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures 
to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, 
or the robust old age of the oak he has planted 
over-night. 

In this falling aside, in this quietude and deser- 
tion of other men, there is no inharmonious pre- 
lude to the last quietude and desertion of the 
grave ; in this dulness of the senses there is a 
gentle preparation for the final insensibility of 
death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in 
a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, 
less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of 
infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long 
decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, 



ORDERED SOUTH 139 

and every moment the movements grow feebler 
and smaller and the attitude more restful and 
easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we 
move no more, so desire after desire leaves him ; 
day by day his strength decreases, and the circle 
of his activity grows ever narrower ; and he feels, 
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the pas- 
sion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slum- 
ber of death, that when at last the end comes, it 
will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to 
reconcile poor spirits to the coming of the last 
enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach 
as this ; not to hale us forth with violence, but to 
persuade us from a place we have no further 
pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that 
approaches as life that withdraws and withers up 
from round about him. He has outlived his own 
usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment ; and 
if there is to be no recovery; if never again will 
he be young and strong and passionate, if the 
actual present shall be to him always like a thing 
read in a book or remembered out of the far-away 
past ; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he 



i 4 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

will not wish greatly for the continuance of a 
twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, 
but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will 
pray for Medea : when she comes, let her either 
rejuvenate or slay. 

And yet the ties that still attach him to the 
world are many and kindly. The sight of chil- 
dren has a significance for him such as it may 
have for the aged also, but not for others. If he 
has been used to feel humanely, and to look upon 
life somewhat more widely than from the narrow 
loophole of personal pleasure and advancement, 
it is strange how small a portion of his thoughts 
will be changed or embittered by this proximity 
of death. He knows that already, in English 
counties, the sower follows the ploughman up the 
face of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; 
and he knows also that he may not live to go 
home again and see the corn spring and ripen, 
and be cut down at last, and brought home with 
gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the 
continuance of drought or the coming of rain 
unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For 



ORDERED SOUTH 141 

he has long been used to wait with interest the 
issue of events in which his own concern was 
nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sor- 
rowful for a famine, that did not increase or 
diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency 
of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered 
all the disinterested hopes for mankind and a 
better future which have been the solace and in- 
spiration of his life. These he has set beyond 
the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; 
and it makes small difference whether he die five 
thousand years, or five thousand and fifty years, 
before the good epoch for which he faithfully 
labours. He has not deceived himself; he has 
known from the beginning that he followed the 
pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in 
the wilderness, and that it was reserved for others 
to enter joyfully into possession of the land. And 
so, as everything grows greyer and quieter about 
him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded 
visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, 
with friendly voices and hopeful words, into the 
very vestibule of death. The desire of love or of 






i 4 2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, 
more strongly than these generous aspirations 
move him now; and so life is carried forward 
beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes 
of hope, even when his hands grope already on 
the face of the impassable. 

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the 
thought of his friends; or shall we not say 
rather, that by their thought for him, by their 
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains 
woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the 
power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thou- 
sand ways will he survive and be perpetuated. 
Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during all 
the years in which Montaigne continued to con- 
verse with him on the pages of the ever-delightful 
essays. Much of what was truly Goethe was dead 
already when he revisited places that knew him 
no more, and found no better consolation than 
the promise of his own verses, that soon he too 
would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of 
what it is that we most seek and cherish, and 
find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, it 



ORDERED SOUTH 143 

will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at 
our decease, would suffer loss more truly than 
ourselves. As a monarch who should care more 
for the outlying colonies he knows on the map 
or through the report of his vicegerents, than for 
the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, 
are we not more concerned about the shadowy 
life that we have in the hearts of others, and 
that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, 
in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than 
about the real knot of our identity — that central 
metropolis of self, of which alone we are imme- 
diately aware — or the diligent service of arteries 
and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, 
which Ave know (as we know a proposition in 
Euclid) to be the source and substance of the 
whole? At the death of every one whom we 
love, some fair and honourable portion of our 
existence falls away, and we are dislodged from 
one of these dear provinces; and they are not, 
perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long 
series of such impoverishments, till their life and 
influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit 



i 4 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of their own spirits, and Death, when he comes 
at last, can destroy them at one blow. 

Note. — To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two 
of qualification ; for this is one of the points on which a slightly 
greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom : 

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular 
obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing butter- 
flies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of the 
human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love. 
As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's 
action in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in 
the particular, lie has not that same unspeakable trust in what 
he would have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that 
would have been little ; but he has a far higher notion of the blank 
that he will make by dying. A young man feels himself one too 
many in the world; his is a painful situation; he has no calling; 
no obvious utility ; no ties, but to his parents, and these he is sure 
to disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been 
made for this true cause of suffering in youth ; but by the mere 
fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact or else 
the feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed to our 
own useless figure in the world, or else — and this, thank God, in 
the majority of cases — we so collect about us the interest or the 
love of our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of 
life, that we need to entertain no longer the question of our right 
to be. 

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself 
dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed 
in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, 
some to correct ; it may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not 
upon humanity, but upon the man himself. It is he, not another, 
who is one woman's son and a second woman's husband and a third 
woman's father. That life which began so small, has now grown, 
with a myriad filaments, into the lives of others. It is not indis- 
pcns.iole ; another will take the place and shoulder the discharged 



ORDERED SOUTH 145 

responsibility ; but the better the man and the nobler his purposes, 
the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction of his powers 
and the deletion of his personality. To have lived a generation, 
is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing medium, 
but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age, 
has, for all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. 
A man does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a 
future that is never to be his ; but beholding himself so early a 
deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he might 
have done already. To have been so useless and now to lose all 
hope of being useful any more — there it is that death and memory 
assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic 
cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily from strength to 
strength'; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, 
his wife remarried by a better than he ; how shall this alter, in one 
jot, his estimation of a career which was his only business in this 
world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is now so ineffect- 
ively to end? 



MS TRIPLEX 

THE changes wrought by death are in 
themselves so sharp and final, and so 
terrible and melancholy in their conse- 
quences, that the thing stands alone in man's 
experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It 
outdoes all other accidents because it is the last 
of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its 
victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular 
siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score 
of years. And when the business is done, there 
is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a 
pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friend- 
ships hung- together. There are empty chairs, 
solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, 
in taking away our friends, death does not take 
them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, 
tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must 
be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter 



JES TRIPLEX 147 

of sights and customs striking to the mind, from 
the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule 
trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons 
have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; 
memorial stones are set up over the least memo- 
rable; and, in order to preserve some show of 
respect for what remains of our old loves and 
friendships, we must accompany it with much 
grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired under- 
taker parades before the door. All this, and much 
more of the same sort, accompanied by the elo- 
quence of poets, has gone a great way to put 
humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the 
error has been embodied and laid down with 
every circumstance of logic; although in real life 
the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little 
time to think, have not left them time enough to 
go dangerously wrong in practice. 

As a matter of fact, although few things are 
spoken of with more fearful whisperings than 
this prospect of death, few have less influence on 
conduct under healthy circumstances. We have 
all heard of cities in South America built upon 



148 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in 
this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants 
are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity 
of mortal conditions than if they were delving 
gardens in the greenest corner of England. 
There are serenades and suppers and much gal- 
lantry among the myrtles overhead ; and mean- 
while the foundation shudders underfoot, the 
bowels of the mountain growl, and at any mo- 
ment living ruin may leap sky-high into the 
moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making 
in the dust. In the eyes of very young people, 
and very dull old ones, there is something inde- 
scribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. 
It seems not credible that respectable married 
people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for 
a bit of supper within quite a long distance of 
a fiery mountain ; ordinary life begins to smell 
of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so 
close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, 
it seems, could hardly be relished in such cir- 
cumstances without something like a defiance of 
the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but 



JES TRIPLEX 149 

hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or 
mere born-devils drowning care in a perpetual 
carouse. 

And yet, when one comes to think upon it 
calmly, the situation of these South American 
citizens forms only a very pale figure for the 
state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, 
travelling blindly and swiftly in overcrowded 
space, among a million other worlds travelling 
blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may 
very well come by a knock that would set it 
into explosion like a penny squib. And what, 
pathologically looked at, is the human body with 
all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The 
least of these is as dangerous to the whole econ- 
omy as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship; 
and with every breath we breathe, and every meal 
we eat, we are putting one or more of them in 
peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philoso- 
phers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, 
or were half as frightened as they make out we 
are, for the subversive accident that ends it all, 
the trumpets might sound by the hour and no 



ISO VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

one would follow them into battle — the blue- 
peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb 
into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philoso- 
phers were right) with what a preparation of 
spirit we should affront the daily peril of the 
dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field 
in history, where the far greater proportion of 
our ancestors have miserably left their bones! 
What woman would ever be lured into marriage, 
so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? 
And what would it be to grow old? For, after 
a certain distance, every step we take in life we 
find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and 
all around us and behind us we see our contem- 
poraries going through. By the time a man gets 
well into the seventies, his continued existence is 
a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones 
in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming 
probability that he will never see the day. Do 
the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, 
no. They were never merrier; they have their 
grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they 
hear of the death of people about their own age, 



iES TRIPLEX 151 

or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warn- 
ing, but with a simple childlike pleasure at hav- 
ing outlived some one else; and when a draught 
might puff them out like a guttering candle, or 
a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much 
glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaf- 
frighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, 
through years of man's age compared to which 
the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful 
as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may 
fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril 
only) whether it was a much more daring feat 
for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any 
old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and 
clamber into bed. 

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consid- 
eration, with what unconcern and gaiety man- 
kind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow 
of Death. The whole way is one wilderness of 
snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the 
last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go 
spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby. 
Perhaps the reader remembers one of the humour- 



152 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ous devices of the deified Caligula : how he en- 
couraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on 
to his bridge over Baioe bay ; and when they 
were in the height of their enjoyment, turned 
loose the Praetorian guards among the company, 
and had them tossed into the sea. This is no 
bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the 
transitory race of man. Only, what a chequered 
picnic we have of it, even while it lasts ! and 
into what great waters, not to be crossed by any 
swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over 
in the end ! 

We live the time that a match flickers ; we pop 
the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earth- 
quake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, 
is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest 
sense of human speech, incredible, that we should 
think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard 
so little the devouring earthquake? The love of 
Life and the fear of Death are two famous 
phrases that grow harder to understand the more 
we think about them. It is a well-known fact 
that an immense proportion of boat accidents 



JES TRIPLEX 153 

would never happen if people held the sheet in 
their hands instead of making it fast ; and yet, 
unless it be some martinet of a professional mari- 
ner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every 
one of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange 
instance of man's unconcern and brazen boldness 
in the face of death ! 

We confound ourselves with metaphysical 
phrases, which we import into daily talk with 
noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of 
what death is, apart from its circumstances and 
some of its consequences to others ; and although 
we have some experience of living, there is not 
a man on earth who has flown so high into ab- 
straction as to have any practical guess at the 
meaning of the word life. All literature, from 
Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or 
Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon 
the human state with such largeness of view as 
shall enable us to rise from the consideration of 
living to the Definition of Life. And our sages 
give us about the best satisfaction in their power 
when they say that it is a vapour, or a show, 



i 5 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

or made out of the same stuff with dreams. 
Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at 
the same work for ages ; and after a myriad 
bald heads have wagged over the problem, and 
piles of words have been heaped one upon an- 
other into dry and cloudy volumes without end, 
philosophy has the honour of laying before us, 
with modest pride, her contribution towards the 
subject : that life is a Permanent Possibility of 
Sensation. Truly a fine result ! A man may very 
well love beef, or hunting, or a woman ; but 
surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of 
Sensation ! He may be afraid of a precipice, or 
a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even 
an undertaker's man ; but not certainly of abstract 
death. "We may trick with the word life in its 
dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we 
may argue in terms of all the philosophies on 
earth, but one fact remains true throughout — 
that we do not love life, in the sense that we 
are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; 
that we do not, properly speaking, love life at 
all, but livinsr. Into the views of the least care- 



iES TRIPLEX 155 

ful there will enter some degree of providence; 
no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing 
hour; but although we have some anticipation 
of good health, good weather, wine, active em- 
ployment, love, and self-approval, the sum of 
these anticipations does not amount to anything 
like a general view of life's possibilities and is- 
sues ; nor are those who cherish them most 
vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their per- 
sonal safety. To be deeply interested in the ac- 
cidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the 
mixed texture of human experience, rather leads 
a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck 
against a straw. For surely the love of living 
is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a 
peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, 
than in a creature who lives upon a diet and 
walks a measured distance in the interest of his 
constitution. 

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense 
talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing 
divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere 
funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent ; 



156 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb 
as if it were a world too far away. Both sides 
must feel a little ashamed of their performances 
now and again when "they draw in their chairs 
to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of 
wine is an answer to most standard works upon 
the question. When a man's heart warms to his 
viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and 
soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death 
may be knocking at the door, like the Com- 
mander's statue ; we have something else in hand, 
thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are 
ringing all the world over. All the world over, 
and every hour, some one is parting company 
with all his aches and ecstasies. For us also the 
trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we 
have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. 
It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none 
of the longest. Small blame to us if we give 
our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, 
to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curi- 
osity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in 
nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies. 



JES TRIPLEX 157 

We all of us appreciate the sensations ; but as 
for caring about the Permanence of the Possibil- 
ity, a man's head is generally very bald, and his 
senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether 
we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall — 
a mere bag's end, as the French say — or whether 
we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where 
we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for 
some more noble destiny ; whether we thunder in 
a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, 
about its vanity and brevity ; whether we look 
justly for years of health and vigour, or are 
about to mount into a Bath-chair, as a step 
towards the hearse; in each and all of these 
views and situations there is but one conclusion 
possible : that a man should stop his ears against 
paralysing terror, and run the race that is set 
before him with a single mind. No one surely 
could have recoiled with more heartache and terror 
from the thought of death than our respected 
lexicographer; and yet we know how little it 
affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he 
walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he 



158 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured 
on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with 
triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven 
individual cups of tea. As courage and intelli- 
gence are the two qualities best worth a good 
man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intel- 
ligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, 
and the first part of courage to be not at all 
abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat 
headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously be- 
fore, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, 
stamps the man who is well armoured for this 
world. 

And not only well armoured for himself, but 
a good friend and a good citizen to boot. We 
do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there 
is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has 
least fear for his own carcass, has most time to 
consider others. That eminent chemist who took 
his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly 
upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him 
in considerate dealings with his own digestion. 
So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in 



MS TRIPLEX 159 

the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first 
expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The 
victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops 
a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature, 
and takes his morality on the principle of tin 
shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important 
body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the 
noises of the outer world begin to come thin and 
faint into the parlour with the regulated tempera- 
ture; and the tin shoes go equably forward over 
blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and 
the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. 
Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, 
and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who 
reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used 
and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different 
acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses 
going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he 
runs, until, if he be running towards an3'thing 
better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become 
a constellation in the end. Lord look after his 
health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; 
and he has at the key of the position, and swashes 



160 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

through incongruity and peril towards his aim. 
Death is on all sides of him with pointed, bat- 
teries, as he is on all sides of all of us ; unfor- 
tunate surprises gird him round ; mimmouthed 
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite 
a little elegiacal synod about his path : and what 
cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, 
a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous 
in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in 
any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his 
best pace until he touch the goal. " A peerage or 
Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, 
boyish, heroic manner. These are great incen- 
tives ; not for any of these, but for the plain 
satisfaction of living, of being about their busi- 
ness in some sort or other, do the brave, service- 
able men of every nation tread down the nettle 
danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling- 
blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of 
Johnson, think of that superb indifference to 
mortal limitation that set him upon his diction- 
ary, and carried him through triumphantly until 
the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate 



MS TRIPLEX 161 

of things at large, would ever embark upon any- 
work much more considerable than a halfpenny 
post card? Who would project a serial novel, 
after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in 
mid-course? Who would find heart enough to 
begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration 
of death? 

1 And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling 
all this is ! To forego all the issues of living in 
a parlour with a regulated temperature — as if 
that were not to die a hundred times over, and 
for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to 
die in one's own lifetime, and without even the 
sad immunities of death ! As if it were not to 
die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own 
pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is 
preserved, but the sensations carefully held at 
arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate 
in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health 
like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. 
It is better to live and be done with it, than to 
die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin 
your folio; even if the doctor does not give you 



i6a VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make 
one brave push and see what can be accomplished 
in a week. It is not only in finished undertak- 
ings that we ought to honour useful labour. A 
spirit goes out of the man who means execution, 
which outlives the most untimely ending. All 
who have meant good work with their whole 
hearts, have done good work, although they may 
die before they have the time to sign it. Every 
heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left 
a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and 
bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if 
death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in 
mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning 
monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and 
their mouths full of boastful language, they 
should be at once tripped up and silenced: is 
there not something brave and spirited in such 
a termination? and does not life go down with 
a better grace, foaming in full body over a preci- 
pice, than miserably straggling to an end in 
sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine 
saying that those whom the guds love die young, 



JES TRIPLEX 163 

I cannot help believing they had this sort of 
death also in their eye. Fur surely, at whatever 
age it overtake the man, this is to die young. 
Death has not been suffered to take so much as 
an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, 
a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes 
at a bound on to the other side. The noise of 
the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing 
with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full- 
blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land. 



EL DORADO 

IT seems as if a great deal were attainable 
in a world where there are so many mar- 
riages and decisive battles, and where we 
all, at certain hours of the day, and with great 
gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals 
finally and irretrievably into the bag which con- 
tains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty 
view, that the attainment of as much as possible 
was the one goal of man's contentious life. And 
yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. 
We live in an ascending scale when we live hap- 
pily, one thing leading to another in an endless 
series. There is always a new horizon for on- 
ward-looking men, and although we dwell on a 
small planet, immersed in petty business and not 
enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are 
so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like 
stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until 



EL DORADO 165 

the term of life. To be truly happy is a ques- 
tion of how we begin and not of how we end, 
of what we want and not of what we have. An 
aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid 
as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never 
exhaust and which gives us year by year a rev- 
enue of pleasurable activity. To have many of 
these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a 
very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have 
some interests in the piece ; and to those who 
have neither art nor science, the world is a mere 
arrangement of colours, or a rough footway 
where they may very well break their shins. It 
is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities 
that any man continues to exist with even pa- 
tience, that he is charmed by the look of things 
and people, and that he wakens every morning 
with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. 
Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through 
which he sees the world in the most enchanted 
colours : it is they that make women beautiful or 
fossils interesting: and the man may squander 
his estate and come to beggary, but 'if he keeps 



166 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

these two amulets he is still rich in the possibili- 
ties of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal 
so compact and comprehensive that he should 
never hunger any more; suppose him, at a 
glance, to take in all the features of the world 
and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him 
to do the like in any province of experience — 
would not that man be in a poor way for amuse- 
ment ever after? 

One who goes touring on foot with a single 
volume in his knapsack reads with circumspection, 
pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book 
down to contemplate the landscape or the prints 
in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end 
of his entertainment, and be left companionless 
on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow 
recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, 
winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten 
note-books upon Frederick the Great. " What ! " 
cried the young fellow, in consternation, " is there 
no more Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers? " 
A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, 
who wept bitterly because he had no more worlds 



EL DORADO 167 

to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the 
Decline and Fall, he had only a few moments of 
joy; and it was with a "sober melancholy" that 
he parted from his labours. 

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffec- 
tual arrows ; our hopes are set on inaccessible El 
Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here 
below. Interests are only plucked up to sow 
themselves again, like mustard. You would think, 
when the child was born, there would be an end 
to trouble ; and yet it is only the beginning of 
fresh anxieties ; and when you have seen it through 
its teething and its education, and at last its mar- 
riage, alas ! it is only to have new fears, new 
quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the 
health of your children's children grows as touch- 
ing a concern as that of your own. Again, when 
you have married your wife, you would think you 
were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go 
downward by an easy slope. But you have only 
ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in 
love and winning love are often difficult tasks to 
overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in 



168 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

love is also a business of some importance, to 
which both man and wife must bring kindness and 
good-will. The true love story commences at the 
altar, when there lies before the married pair a 
most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, 
and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable 
ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, 
from the very fact that they are two instead of 
one. 

" Of making books there is no end," complained 
the Preacher; and did not perceive how highly 
he was praising letters as an occupation. There 
is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, 
or to travel, or to gathering wealth. Problem 
gives rise to problem. We may study for ever, 
and we are never as learned as we would. We 
have never made a statue worthy of our dreams. 
And when we have discovered a continent, or 
crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find an- 
other ocean or another plain upon the further side. 
In the infinite universe there is room for our 
swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the 
works of Carlyle, which can be read to an end. 



EL DORADO 169 

Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or in the 
neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather 
and the seasons keep so deftly changing that 
although we walk there for a lifetime there will 
be always something new to startle and delight 
us. 

There is only one wish realisable on the earth ; 
only one thing that can be perfectly attained : 
Death. And from a variety of circumstances 
we have no one to tell us whether it be worth 
attaining. 

A strange picture we make on our way to our 
chimaeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging our- 
selves the time for rest; indefatigable, adventur- 
ous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach 
the goal ; it is even more than probable that there 
is no such place; and if we lived for centuries 
and were endowed with the powers of a god, 
we should find ourselves not much nearer what 
we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of mortals ! 
O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither ! 
Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth 
on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way 



iyo V1RGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

further, against the setting sun, descry the spires 
of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own 
blessedness ; for to travel hopefully is a better 
thing than to arrive, and the true success is to 
labour. 



THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS 

" Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure 
it is so in States to honour them." — Sir William Temple. 

THERE is one story of the wars of Rome 
which I have always very much envied 
for England. Germanictis was going 
down at the head of the legions into a dangerous 
river — on the opposite bank the woods were 
full of Germans — when there flew out seven 
great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans 
on their way; they did not pause or waver, but 
disappeared into the forest where the enemy lay 
concealed. " Forward ! " cried Germanicus, with 
a fine rhetorical inspiration, " Forward ! and follow 
the Roman birds." It would be a very heavy 
spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, 
and a very timorous one that continued to have 
any doubt of success. To appropriate the eagles 
as fellow-countrymen was to make imaginary 
allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire 



i 7 2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

and its military fortunes, and along with these 
the prospects of those individual Roman legion- 
aries now fording a river in Germany, looked al- 
together greater and more hopeful. It is a kind 
of illusion easy to produce. A particular shape 
of cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the 
holiday of some particular saint, anything in short 
to remind the combatants of patriotic legends or 
old successes, may be enough to change the issue 
of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one party 
a feeling that Right and the larger interests are 
with them. 

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feel- 
ing, it must be about the sea. The lion is nothing 
to us; he has not been taken to the hearts of the 
people, and naturalised as an English emblem. 
We know right well that a lion would fall foul 
of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or 
a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before 
us in the smoke of battle. But the sea is our 
approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of 
our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are 
accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 173 

own. The prostrating experiences of foreigners 
between Calais and Dover have always an agree- 
able side to English prepossessions. A man from 
Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the 
ship from the other until she begins to move, 
swaggers among such persons with a sense of 
hereditary nautical experience. To suppose your- 
self endowed with natural parts for the sea be- 
cause you are the countryman of Blake and mighty 
Nelson, is perhaps just as unwarrantable as to 
imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee 
that you will look well in a kilt. But the feeling 
is there, and seated beyond the reach of argument. 
We should consider ourselves unworthy of ©ur 
descent if we did not share the arrogance of our 
progenitors, and please ourselves with the preten- 
sion that the sea is English. Even where it is 
looked upon by the guns and battlements of an- 
other nation we regard it as a kind of English 
cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers 
take their rest until the last trumpet; for I sup- 
pose no other nation has lost as many ships, or 
sent as many brave fellows to the bottom. 



i74 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

There is nowhere such a background for hero- 
ism as the noble, terrifying, and picturesque con- 
ditions of some of our sea-fights. Hawke's battle 
in the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when 
the French Admiral blew up, reach the limit of 
what is imposing to the imagination. And our 
naval annals owe some of their interest to the 
fantastic and beautiful appearance of old war- 
ships and the romance that invests the sea and 
everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads 
on a half-holiday at the coast. Nay, and what we 
know of the misery between decks enhances the 
bravery of what was done by giving it something 
for contrast. We like to know that these bold and 
honest fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold 
and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. 
No reader can forget the description of the 
Thunder in Roderick Random: the disorderly 
tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; 
deck after deck, each with some new object of 
offence; the hospital, where the hammocks were 
huddled together with but fourteen inches, space 
for each ; the cockpit, far under water, where, 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 175 

" in an intolerable stench," the spectacled steward 
kept the accounts of the different messes; and the 
canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan 
made flip and salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang 
his Welsh songs, and swore his queer Welsh im- 
precations. There are portions of this business 
on board the Thunder over which the reader 
passes lightly and hurriedly, like a traveller in a 
malarious country. It is easy enough to under- 
stand the opinion of Dr. Johnson : " Why, sir," 
he said, " no man will be a sailor who has con- 
trivance enough to get himself into a jail." You 
would fancy any one's spirit would die out under 
such an accumulation of darkness, noisomeness, 
and injustice, above all when he had not come 
there of his own free will, but under the cutlasses 
and bludgeons of the press-gang. But perhaps 
a watch on deck in the sharp sea-air put a man 
on his mettle again ; a battle must have been a 
capital relief; and prize-money, bloodily earned 
and grossly squandered, opened the doors of the 
prison for a twinkling. Somehow or other, at 
least, this worst of possible lives could not over- 



176 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

lie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did 
their duty as though they had some interest in 
the fortune of that country which so cruelly op- 
pressed them, they served their guns merrily 
when it came to fighting, and they had the readi- 
est ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any 
class of men the world ever produced. 

Most men of high destinies have high-sound- 
ing names. Pym and Habakkuk may do pretty 
well, but they must not think to cope with the 
Cromwells and Isaiahs. And you could not find 
a better case in point than that of the English 
Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are 
picked names for men of execution. Frobisher, 
Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather Jack Byron, are 
all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval his- 
tory. Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of quaint 
and sounding syllables. Benbow has a bulldog 
quality that suits the man's character, and it takes 
us back to those English archers who were his 
true comrades for plainness, tenacity, and pluck. 
Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an 
act of bold conduct in the field. It is impossible 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 177 

to judge of Blake or Nelson, no names current 
among men being worthy of such heroes. But 
still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in this 
connection, that the latter was greatly taken with 
his Sicilian title. " The signification, perhaps, 
pleased him," says Southey; "Duke of Thunder 
was what in Dahomey would have been called a 
strong name; it was to a sailor's taste, and cer- 
tainly to no man could it be more applicable." 
Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory 
of distinctions; it has a noble sound and a very 
proud history; and Columbus thought so highly 
of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign them- 
selves by that title as long as the house should 
last. 

But it is the spirit of the men, and not their 
names, that I wish to speak about in this paper. 
That spirit is truly English ; they, and not Tenny- 
son's cotton-spinners or Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's 
Abstract Bagman, are the true and typical Eng- 
lishmen. There may be more head of bagmen in 
the country, but human beings are reckoned by 
number only in political constitutions. And the 



178 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

Admirals are typical in the full force of the word. 
They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but 
of a virtue in which most Englishmen can claim 
a moderate share; and what we admire in their 
lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost 
everybody in our land, except humanitarians and 
a few persons whose youth has been depressed 
by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can un- 
derstand and sympathise with an Admiral or a 
prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket Benbow 
and Tom Cribb ; but, depend upon it, they are 
practically bracketed for admiration in the minds 
of many frequenters of ale-houses. If you told 
them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus 
going back to Carthage, they would very likely 
fall asleep; but tell them about Harry Pearce and 
Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and 
they put down their pipes to listen. I have by me 
a copy of Boxiana, on the fly-leaves of which a 
youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle 
of remarkable events and an obituary of great men. 
Here we find piously chronicled the demise of 
jockeys, watermen, and pugilists — Johnny Moore, 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 179 

of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged 
fifty-six ; " Pierce Egan, senior, writer of Boxi- 
ana and other sporting works " — and among all 
these, the Duke of Wellington ! If Benbow had 
lived in the time of this annalist, do you suppose 
his name would not have been added to the glori- 
ous roll? In short, we do not all feel warmly 
towards Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleas- 
ure in Paradise Lost; but there are certain com- 
mon sentiments and touches of nature by which 
the whole nation is made to feel kinship. A little 
while ago everybody, from Hazlitt and John Wil- 
son down to the imbecile creature who scribbled 
his register on the fly-leaves of Boxiana, felt a 
more or less shamefaced satisfaction in the ex- 
ploits of prize-fighters. And the exploits of the 
Admirals are popular to the same degree, and tell 
in all ranks of society. Their sayings and doings 
stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; 
and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, 
and all the outward and visible ensigns of our 
greatness should pass away, we should still leave 
behind us a durable monument of what we 



180 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

were in these sayings and doings of the English 
Admirals. 

Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flag- 
ship, the Venerable, and only one other vessel, 
heard that the whole Dutch fleet was putting to 
sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor along- 
side of him in the narrowest part of the channel, 
and fight his vessel till she sank. " I have taken 
the depth of the water," added he, " and when 
the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly." 
And you observe this is no naked Viking in a pre- 
historic period ; but a Scotch member of Parlia- 
ment, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, 
a cocked hat of great size, and flannel under- 
clothing. In the same spirit. Nelson went into 
Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even if 
five were shot away, it should not be imagined he 
had struck. He too must needs wear his four 
stars outside his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for 
sharp-shooters. " In honour I gained them," he 
said to objectors, adding with sublime illogical- 
ity, " in honour I will die with them." Captain 
Douglas of the Royal Oak, when the Dutch fired 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 181 

his vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but 
was burned along with her himself rather than 
desert his post without orders. Just then, per- 
haps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth 
round the supper-table with the ladies of his court. 
When Raleigh sailed into Cadiz, and all the forts 
and ships opened fire on him at once, he scorned 
to shoot a gun, and made answer with a flourish 
of insulting trumpets. I like this bravado better 
than the wisest dispositions to insure victory ; it 
comes from the heart and goes to it. God has 
made nobler heroes, but he never made a finer 
gentleman than Walter Raleigh. And as our Ad- 
mirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a 
strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they 
discovered a startling eagerness for battle, and 
courted war like a mistress. When the news came 
to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had been 
decided, he threw his hat into the sea. It is in this 
way that a schoolboy hears of a half-holiday; but 
this was a bearded man of great possessions who 
had just been allowed to risk his life. Benbow 
could not lie still in his bunk after he had lost his 



182 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

leg; he must be on deck in a basket to direct and 
animate the fight. I said they loved war like a 
mistress ; yet I think there are not many mistresses 
we should continue to woo under similar circum- 
stances. Trowbridge went ashore with the Cullo- 
den, and was able to take no part in the battle 
of the Nile. " The merits of that ship and her 
gallant captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, 
" are too well known to benefit by anything I 
could say. Her misfortune was great in getting 
aground, while her more fortunate companions 
were in the full tide of happiness." This is a no- 
table expression, and depicts the whole great- 
hearted, big-spoken stock of the English Admirals 
to a hair. It was to be " in the full tide of hap- 
piness " for Nelson to destroy five thousand five 
hundred and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, 
and have his own scalp torn open by a piece of 
langridge shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen : 
" A shot through the mainmast knocked the splin- 
ters about ; and he observed to one of his officers 
with a smile, ' It is warm work, and this may be 
the last to any of us at any moment ; ' and then, 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 183 

stopping short at the gangway, added, with emo- 
tion, ' But, mark you — / would not be elsewhere 
for thousands.' ' I must tell one more story, 
which has lately been made familiar to us all, and 
that in one of the noblest ballads in the English 
language. I had written my tame prose abstract, 
I shall beg the reader to believe, when I had no 
notion that the sacred bard designed an immortal- 
ity for Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was 
Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas Howard, and lay 
off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. 
He was a noted tyrant to his crew : a dark, bully- 
ing fellow apparently ; and it is related of him that 
he would chew and swallow wineglasses, by way 
of convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his 
mouth. When the Spanish fleet of fifty sail came 
within sight of the English, his ship, the Revenge, 
w r as the last to weigh anchor, and was so far cir- 
cumvented by the Spaniards, that there were but 
two courses open — either to turn her back upon 
the enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. 
The first alternative Greenville dismissed as dis- 
honourable to himself, his country, and her Maj- 



i8 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

esty's ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and 
steered into the Spanish armament. Several ves- 
sels he forced to lnff and fall under his lee; until, 
about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great ship 
of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of 
his sails, and immediately boarded. Thencefor- 
ward, and all night long, the Revenge held her 
own single-handed against the Spaniards. As one 
ship was beaten off, another took its place. She 
endured, according to Raleigh's computation, 
" eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides 
many assaults and entries." By morning the 
powder was spent, the pikes all broken, not a 
stick was standing, " nothing left overhead either 
for flight or defence;" six feet of water in the 
hold ; almost all the men hurt ; and Greenville 
himself in a dying condition. To bring them 
to this pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling 
them for fifteen hours, the Admiral of the Hulks 
and the Ascension of Seville had both gone down 
alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge 
on shore in a sinking state. In Hawke's words, 
they had " taken a great deal of drubbing." The 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 185 

captain and crew thought they had done about 
enough ; but Greenville was not of this opinion ; 
he gave orders to the master gunner, whom he 
knew to be a fellow after his own stamp, to 
scuttle the Revenge where she lay. The others, 
who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral, 
interfered with some decision, locked the master 
gunner in his cabin, after having deprived him 
of his sword, for he manifested an intention to 
kill himself if he were not to sink the ship; and 
sent to the Spaniards to demand terms. These 
were granted. The second or third day after, 
Greenville died of his wounds aboard the Spanish 
flagship, leaving his contempt upon the " traitors 
and dogs " who had not chosen to do as he did, 
and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully 
manned, with six inferior craft ravaged by sick- 
ness and short of stores. He at least, he said, 
had done his duty as he was bound to do, and 
looked for everlasting fame. 

Some one said to me the other day that they 
considered this story to be of a pestilent example. 
I am not inclined to imagine we shall ever be put 



186 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of 
Greenvilles. And besides, I demur to the opinion. 
The worth of such actions is not a thing to be 
decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of 
righteous common-sense. The man who wished 
to make the ballads of his country, coveted a 
small matter compared to what Richard Green- 
ville accomplished. I wonder how many people 
have been inspired by this mad story, and how 
many battles have been actually won for England 
in the spirit thus engendered. It is only with a 
measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can 
be sure, in the common run of men, of courage 
on a reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if 
it is not led by quixotic fancies, will not be led 
far by terror of the Provost Marshal. Even 
German warfare, in addition to maps and tele- 
graphs, is not above employing the Wacht am 
Rhcin. Nor is it only in the profession of arms 
that such stories may do good to a man. In 
this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is 
Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who 
flies his colours in the ship, we see men brought 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 187 

to the test and giving proof of what we call heroic 
feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my 
club smoking-room, that they are a prey to pro- 
digious heroic feelings, and that it costs them 
more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular, 
than would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, 
of bellicose humanity. It may very well be so, 
and yet not touch the point in question. For what 
I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face 
to face with me in an inspiriting achievement. A 
man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my club 
smoking-room from now to the Day of Judg- 
ment, without adding anything to mankind's 
treasury of illustrious and encouraging examples. 
It is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party 
novel, that people are abashed into high resolu- 
tions. It may be because their hearts are crass, 
but to stir them properly they must have men 
entering into glory with some pomp and circum- 
stance. And that is why these stories of our sea- 
captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full 
of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to 
England than any material benefit in all the 



188 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

books of political economy between Westminster 
and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wineglasses 
at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more 
than a thousand other artists when they are viewed 
in the body, ipr met in private life; but his work 
of art, his finisffed tragedy, is an eloquent perform- 
ance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven 
men of the sword as they go into battle, but send 
back merchant clerks with more heart and spirit 
to their book-keeping by double entry. 

There is another question which seems bound 
up in this ; and that is Temple's problem : whether 
it was wise of Douglas to burn with the Royal 
Oak? and by implication, what it was that made 
him do so? Many will tell you it was the desire 
of fame. 

" To what do Csesar and Alexander owe the 
infinite grandeur of their renown, but to fortune? 
How many men has she extinguished in the be- 
ginning of their progress, of whom we have no 
knowledge; who brought as much courage to the 
work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut 
them off in the first sally of their arms ? Amongst 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 189 

so many and so great dangers, I do not remem- 
ber to have anywhere read that Cassar was ever 
wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers 
than the least of these he went through. A great 
many brave actions must be expected to be per- 
formed without witness, for one that comes to 
some notice. A man is not always at the top of 
a breach, or at the head of an army in the sight 
of his general, as upon a platform. He is often 
surprised between the hedge and the ditch ; he 
must run the hazard of his life against a hen- 
roost ; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers 
out of a barn ; he must prick out single from his 
party, as necessity arises, and meet adventures 
alone." 

Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay 
on Glory. Where death is certain, as in the cases 
of Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one from 
a personal point of view. The man who lost his 
life against a henroost, is in the same pickle with 
him who lost his life against a fortified place of 
the first order. Whether he has missed a peerage 
or only the corporal's stripes, it is all one if he 



190 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

has missed them and is quietly in the grave. It 
was by a hazard that we learned the conduct of 
the four marines of the Wager. There was no 
room for these brave fellows in the boat, and 
they were left behind upon the island to a cer- 
tain death. They were soldiers, they said, and 
knew well enough it was their business to die; 
and as their comrades pulled away, they stood 
upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried 
" God bless the king ! " Now, one or two of 
those who were in the boat escaped, against all 
likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great 
thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any pos- 
sible twisting of human speech, be construed into 
anything great for the marines. You may sup- 
pose, if you like, that they died hoping their 
behaviour would not be forgotten ; or you may 
suppose they thought nothing on the subject, 
which is much more likely. What can be the 
signification of the word " fame " to a private of 
marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of 
past history beyond the reminiscences of his grand- 
mother? But whichever supposition you make, 






ENGLISH ADMIRALS 191 

the fact is unchanged. They died while the ques- 
tion still hung in the balance; and I suppose 
their bones were already white, before the winds 
and the waves and the humour of Indian chiefs 
and Spanish governors had decided whether they 
were to be unknown and useless martyrs or hon- 
oured heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the les- 
son : if it is for fame that men do brave actions, 
they are only silly fellows after all. 

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank busi- 
ness to decompose actions into little personal mo- 
tives, and explain heroism away. The Abstract 
Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not 
by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of admira- 
tion. But there is another theory of the personal 
motive in these fine sayings and doings, which 
I believe to be true and wholesome. People usu- 
ally do things, and suffer martyrdoms, because 
they have an inclination that way. The best 
artist is not the man who fixes his eye on pos- 
terity, but the one who loves the practice of his 
art. And instead of having a taste for being 
successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some 



i 9 2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

people have a taste for high and what we call 
heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals 
courted war like a mistress; if, as the drum beat 
to quarters, the sailors came gaily out of the 
forecastle, — it is because a fight is a period of 
multiplied and intense experiences, and, by Nel- 
son's computation, worth " thousands " to any 
one who has a heart under his jacket. If the 
marines of the Wager gave three cheers and cried 
" God bless the king," it was because they liked 
to do things nobly for their own satisfaction. 
They were giving their lives, there was no help 
for that; and they made it a point of self-respect 
to give them handsomely. And there were never 
four happier marines in God's world than these 
four at that moment. If it was worth thousands 
to be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arith- 
metician would calculate how much it was worth 
to be one of these four marines; or how much 
their story is worth to each of us who read it. 
And mark you, undemonstrative men would have 
spoiled the situation. The finest action is the 
better for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of 



ENGLISH ADMIRALS 193 

the Birkenhead had not gone down in line, or 
these marines of the Wager had walked away 
simply into the island, like plenty of other brave 
fellows in the like circumstances, my Benthamite 
arithmetician would assign a far lower value to 
the two stories. We have to desire a grand air 
in our heroes ; and such a knowledge of the 
human stage as shall make them put the dots 
on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as 
to when they mean to be heroic. And hence, we 
should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that 
our Admirals were not only great-hearted but 
big-spoken. 

The heroes themselves say, as often as rot, that 
fame is their object; but I do not think that is 
much to the purpose. People generally say what 
they have been taught to say ; that was the catch- 
word they were given in youth to express the 
aims of their way of life; and men who are 
gaining great battles are not likely to take much 
trouble in reviewing their sentiments and the 
words in which they were told to express them. 
Almost every person, if you will believe himself, 

13 



i 9 4 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

holds a quite different theory of life from the 
one on which he is patently acting. And the fact 
is, fame may be a forethought and an after- 
thought, but it is too abstract an idea to move 
people greatly in moments of swift and momen- 
tous decision. It is from something more imme- 
diate, some determination of blood to the head, 
some trick of the fancy, that the breach is 
stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure 
a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has 
exactly as much thought about fame as most 
commanders going into battle; and yet the ac- 
tion, fall out how it will, is not one of those 
the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is dif- 
ficult to see why the fellow does a thing so 
nameless and yet so formidable to look at, un- 
less on the theory that he likes it. I suspect that 
is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent 
of why Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have 
debated so much in the House of Commons, and 
why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and 
why the Admirals courted war like a mistress. 



SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 

THROUGH the initiative of a prominent 
citizen, Edinburgh has been in posses- 
sion, for some autumn weeks, of a 
gallery of paintings of singular merit and inter- 
est. They were exposed in the apartments of 
the Scotch Academy; and filled those who are 
accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibition, 
with astonishment and a sense of incongruity. 
Instead of the too common purple sunsets, and 
pea-green fields, and distances executed in putty 
and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him 
from the walls of room after room, a whole army 
of wise, grave, humourous, capable, or beautiful 
countenances, painted simply and strongly by a 
man of genuine instinct. It was a complete act 
of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords 
and ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges, 
and heretical divines, a whole generation of good 



196 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

society was resuscitated; and the Scotchman of 
to-day walked about among the Scotchmen of two 
generations ago. The moment was well chosen, 
neither too late nor too early. The people who 
sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they 
are still relations. They are not yet altogether a 
part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle distance 
within cry of our affections. The little child who 
looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in 
the picture, is now the veteran Sheriff emeritus of 
Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who returned 
the other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of 
sixty years : " I could see none of my old friends," 
she said, " until I went into the Raeburn Gallery, 
and found them all there." 

It would be difficult to say whether the collec- 
tion was more interesting on the score of unity 
or diversity. Where the portraits were all of the 
same period, almost all of the same race, and all 
from the same brush, there could not fail to be 
many points of similarity. And yet the similar- 
ity of the handling seems to throw into more 
vigorous relief those personal distinctions which 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 197 

Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was a born 
painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly 
between the eyes, surprised their manners in their 
face, and had possessed himself of what was es- 
sential in their character before they had been 
many minutes in his studio. What he was so 
swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost 
in the moment of conception. He had never any 
difficulty, he said, about either hands or faces. 
About draperies or light or composition, he might 
see room for hesitation or afterthought. But a 
face or a hand was something plain and legible. 
There were no two ways about it, any more than 
about the person's name. And so each of his 
portraits is not only (in Dr. Johnson's phrase, 
aptly quoted on the catalogue) " a piece of his- 
tory," but a piece of biography into the bargain. 
It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were 
equally amusing, and carried its own credentials 
equally upon its face. These portraits are racier 
than many anecdotes, and more complete than 
many a volume of sententious memoirs. You can 
see whether you get a stronger and clearer idea 



i 9 8 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's palette 
or Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. 
And then the portraits are both signed and 
countersigned. For you have, first, the authority 
of the artist, whom you recognise as no mean 
critic of the looks and manners of men ; and next 
you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who 
sits looking out upon you with inimitable inno- 
cence, and apparently under the impression that 
he is in a room by himself. For Raeburn could 
plunge at once through all the constraint and em- 
barrassment of the sitter, and present the face, 
clear, open, and intelligent as at the most disen- 
gaged moments. This is best seen in portraits 
where the sitter is represented in some appropri- 
ate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Dr. Spens 
shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing 
a cause. Above all, from this point of view, the 
portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable. 
A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the 
lower part of the face, with a lean forehead, a nar- 
row nose and a fine nostril, sits with a drawing- 
board upon his knees. He has just paused to 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 199 

render himself account of some difficulty, to dis- 
entangle some complication of line or compare 
neighbouring values. And there, without any 
perceptible wrinkling, you have rendered for you 
exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and the un- 
conscious compression of the mouth, that befit 
and signify an effort of the kind. The whole 
pose, the whole expression, is absolutely direct 
and simple. You are ready to take your oath 
to it that Colonel Lyon had no idea he was sit- 
ting for his picture, and thought of nothing in 
the world besides his own occupation of the 
moment. 

Although the collection did not embrace, I un- 
derstand, nearly the whole of Raeburn's works, 
it was too large not to contain some that were 
indifferent, whether as works of art or as por- 
traits. Certainly the standard was remarkably 
high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there 
were one or two pictures that might have been 
almost as well away — one or two that seemed 
wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope 
were not successful likenesses. Neither of the 



2oo VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

portraits of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, were 
very agreeable to look upon. You do not care 
to think that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. 
And where is that peaked forehead which, accord- 
ing to all written accounts and many portraits, 
was the distinguishing characteristic of his face? 
Again, in spite of his own satisfaction and in spite 
of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that Rae- 
burn was very happy in hands. Without doubt, 
he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to 
study it ; but it was by no means always that he 
gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of 
these rooms hung about with his portraits, you 
were struck with the array of expressive faces, 
as compared with what you may have seen in 
looking round a room full of living people. But 
it was not so with the hands. The portraits dif- 
fered from each other in face perhaps ten times as 
much as they differed by the hand; whereas with 
living people the two go pretty much together; 
and where one is remarkable, the other will al- 
most certainly not be commonplace. 

One interesting portrait was that of Duncan 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 201 

of Camperdown. He stands in uniform beside a 
table, his feet slightly straddled with the balance 
of an old sailor, his hand poised upon a chart by 
the finger tips. The mouth is pursed, the nostril 
spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly 
arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of 
iron, and have the redness that comes from much 
exposure to salt sea-winds. From the whole 
figure, attitude and countenance, there breathes 
something precise and decisive, something alert, 
wiry, and strong. You can understand, from the 
look of him, that sense, not so much of humour, 
as of what is grimmest and driest in pleasantry, 
which inspired his address before the fight at 
Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch 
fleet under Admiral de Winter. " Gentlemen," 
says he, " you see a severe winter approaching ; 
I have only to advise you to keep up a good fire." 
Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine drol- 
lery must have supported him in the days of the 
mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel 
with his own flagship, the Venerable, and only 
one other vessel, and kept up active signals, as 



202 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to 
intimidate the Dutch. 

Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the 
eye, was the half-length of Robert M'Queen, of 
Braxfield, Lord Justice-Clerk. If I know gusto 
in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted 
with rare enjoyment. The tart, rosy, humourous 
look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face 
resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and 
perpetuated with something that looks like broth- 
erly love. A peculiarly subtle expression haunts 
the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like that 
of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy 
it has been somewhat too long uncorked. From 
under the pendulous eyelids of old age, the eyes 
look out with a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle. 
Hands, with no pretence to distinction, are folded 
on the judge's stomach. So sympathetically is 
the character conceived by the portrait painter, 
that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement 
of sympathy on the part of the spectator. And 
sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from 
humane considerations, because it supplies us with 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 203 

the materials for wisdom. It is probably more 
instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any 
unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord 
Braxfield, than to give way to perfect raptures 
of moral indignation against his abstract vices. 
He was the last judge on the Scotch bench to 
employ the pure Scotch idiom. Hisiopinions, thus 
given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, 
conversational style, were full of point and author- 
ity. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a 
convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who 
" shone peculiarly " at tavern meetings. He has 
left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough 
and cruel speech ; and to this day his name smacks 
of the gallows. It was he who presided at the 
trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; 
and his appearance on these occasions was scarcely 
cut to the pattern of to-day. His summing up 
on Muir began thus — the reader must supply for 
himself " the growling, blacksmith's voice " and 
the broad Scotch accent : " Now this is the ques- 
tion for consideration — Is the panel guilty of 
sedition, or is he not? Now, before this can be 



204 VIRGINIBUS PUERISOUE 

answered, two things must be attended to that 
require no proof: First, that the British constitu- 
tion is the best that ever was since the creation 
of the world, and it is not possible to make it 
better." It 's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a 
political trial? A little later, he has occasion to 
refer to the relations of Muir with " those 
wretches," the French. " I never liked the French 
all my days," said his lordship, " but now I hate 
them." And yet a little further on : "A govern- 
ment in any country should be like a corporation ; 
and in this country it is made up of the landed 
interest, which alone has a right to be represented. 
As for the rabble who have nothing but personal 
property, what hold has the nation of them? 
They may pack up their property on their backs, 
and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye." 
After having made profession of sentiments so 
cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials 
were at an end, which was generally about mid- 
night, Braxfield would walk home to his house 
in George Square with no better escort than an 
easy conscience. I think I see him getting his 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 205 

cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a 
lantern in one hand, steering his way along the 
streets in the mirk January night. It might have 
been that very day that Skirving had defied him 
in these words : " It is altogether unavailing for 
your lordship to menace me; for I have long 
learned to fear not the face of man ; " and I can 
fancy, as Braxfield reflected on the number of 
what he called Grumblctonians in Edinburgh, and 
of how many of them must bear special malice 
against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, 
and might at that very moment be lurking in the 
mouth of a dark close with hostile intent — I can 
fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he re- 
flected that he also was not especially afraid of 
men's faces or men's fists, and had hitherto found 
no occasion to embody this insensibility in heroic 
words. For if he was an inhumane old gentle- 
man (and I am afraid it is a fact that he was 
inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You 
may look into the queer face of that portrait for 
as long as you will, but you will not see any hole 
or corner for timidity to enter in. 



2o6 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if 
I were even to name half of the portraits that 
were remarkable for their execution, or interesting 
by association. There was one picture of Mr. 
Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which you might palm 
off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close 
by, you saw the white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, 
that country gentleman who, playing with pieces 
of cork on his own dining-table, invented modern 
naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil 
Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily 
through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with 
the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry 
Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper lip, and 
his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out; 
Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and 
looking altogether trim and narrow, and as if he 
cared more about fossils than young ladies; full- 
blown John Robieson, in hyperbolical red dress- 
ing-gown, and, every inch of him, a fine old man 
of the world ; Constable the publisher, upright be- 
side a table, and bearing a corporation with com- 
mercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 207 

if ever anybody heard a cause since the world 
began; Lord Newton just awakened from clan- 
destine slumber on the bench; and the second 
President Dundas, with every feature so fat that 
he reminds you, in his wig, of some droll old court 
officer in an illustrated nursery story-book, and 
yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, 
the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose com- 
bining somehow the dignity of a beak with the 
good-nature of a bottle, and the very double chin 
with an air of intelligence and insight. And all 
these portraits are so pat and telling, and look at 
you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared 
with the sort of living people one sees about the 
streets, they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy 
and obliterated sixpences. Some disparaging 
thoughts upon our own generation could hardly 
fail to present themselves; but it is perhaps only 
the saccr vates who is wanting; and we also, 
painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may 
look in holiday immortality upon our children 
and grandchildren. 

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by 



208 VIRGINIBUS PUER1SQUE 

no means of the same order of merit. No one, 
of course, could be insensible to the presence of 
Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. 
When things are as pretty as that, criticism is out 
of season. But, on the whole, it is only with 
women of a certain age that he can be said to 
have succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say 
he succeeded with men. The younger women do 
not seem to be made of good flesh and blood. 
They are not painted in rich and unctuous touches. 
They are dry and diaphanous. And although 
young ladies in Great Britain are all that can be 
desired of them, I would fain hope they are not 
quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us 
believe. In all these pretty faces, you miss char- 
acter, you miss fire, you miss that spice of the 
devil which is worth all the prettiness in the world; 
and what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young 
ladies are not womanly to nearly the same degree 
as his men are masculine ; they are so in a negative 
sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies 
of the male novelist. 

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with 



PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN 209 

young and pretty sitters; or he had stupefied him- 
self with sentimentalities; or else (and here is 
about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us 
labour under an obstinate blindness in one direc- 
tion, and know very little more about women after 
all these centuries than Adam when he first saw 
Eve. This is all the more likely, because we are 
by no means so unintelligent in the matter of old 
women. There are some capital old women, it 
seems to me, in books written by men. And Rae- 
burn has some, such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of 
Park, or the anonymous " Old lady with a large 
cap," which are done in the same frank, perspica- 
cious spirit as the very best of his men. He could 
look into their eyes without trouble; and he was 
not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from 
recognising what he sftw there and unsparingly 
putting it down upon the canvas. But where 
people cannot meet without some confusion and a 
good deal of involuntary humbug, and are occupied, 
for as long as they are together, with a very dif- 
ferent vein of thought, there cannot be much room 
for intelligent study nor much result in the shape 

14 



2io VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of genuine comprehension. Even women, who 
understand men so well for practical purposes, 
do not know them well enough for the purposes 
of art. Take even the very best of their male 
creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you 
will find he has an equivocal air, and every now 
and again remembers he has a comb at the back 
of his head. Of course, no woman will believe 
this, and many men will be so very polite as to 
humour their incredulity. 



CHILD'S PLAY 

THE regret we have for our childhood is 
not wholly justifiable: so much a man 
may lay down without fear of public 
ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over 
the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold 
advantages of our new state. What we lose in 
generous impulse, we more than gain in the habit 
of generously watching others; and the capacity 
to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude 
for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone out of 
our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil 
in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the 
wind. We go to school no more; and if we have 
only exchanged one drudgery for another (which 
is by no means sure), we are set free for ever 
from the daily fear of chastisement. And yet a 
great change has overtaken us; and although we 
do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our 



2i2 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

pleasure differently. We need pickles nowadays 
to make Wednesday's cold mutton please our Fri- 
day's appetite ; and I can remember the time when 
to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter's 
story, would have made it more palatable than 
the best of sauces. To the grown person, cold 
mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all 
the mythology ever invented by man will make 
it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the 
clamant reality, of the mutton carries away before 
it such seductive figments. But for the child it 
is still possible to weave an enchantment over eat- 
ables ; and if he has but read of a dish in a story 
book, it will be heavenly manna to him for a 
week. 

If a grown man does not like eating and drink- 
ing and exercise, if he is not something positive 
in his tastes, it means he has a feeble body and 
should have some medicine ; but children may be 
pure spirits, if they will, and take their enjoyment 
in a world of moonshine. Sensation does not 
count for so much in our first years as after- 
wards; something of the swaddling numbness of 



CHILD'S PLAY 213 

infancy clings about us; we see and touch and 
hear through a sort of golden mist. Children, for 
instance, are able enough to see, but they have no 
great faculty for looking; they do not use their 
eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by- 
ends of their own ; and the things I call to mind 
seeing most vividly, were not beautiful in them- 
selves, but merely interesting or enviable to me 
as I thought they might be turned to practical 
account in play. Nor is the sense of touch so 
clean and poignant in children as it is in a man. 
If you will turn over your old memories, I think 
the sensations of this sort you remember will be 
somewhat vague, and come to not much more 
than a blunt, general sense of heat on summer 
days, or a blunt, general sense of wellbeing in 
bed. And here, of course, you will understand 
pleasurable sensations ; for overmastering pain — 
the most deadly and tragical element in life, and 
the true commander of man's soul and body — alas ! 
pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks in, 
a rude visitant, upon the fairy garden where the 
child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it 



2i 4 VIRG1NIBUS PUERISQUE 

rules upon the field of battle, or sends the im- 
mortal war-god whimpering to his father; and 
innocence, no more than philosophy, can pro- 
tect us from this sting. As for taste, when 
we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated 
sugar which delight a youthful palate, " it is 
surely no very cynical asperity " to think taste 
a character of the maturer growth. Smell and 
hearing are perhaps more developed ; I remem- 
ber many scents, many voices, and a great deal 
of spring singing in the woods. But hearing is 
capable of vast improvement as a means of pleas- 
ure ; and there is all the world between gaping 
wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the 
emotion with which a man listens to articulate 
music. 

At the same time, and step by step with this 
increase in the definition and intensity of what 
we feel which accompanies our growing age, an- 
other change takes place in the sphere of intellect, 
by which all things are transformed and seen 
through theories and associations as through 
coloured windows. We make to ourselves day 



CHILD'S PLAY 215 

by day, out of history, and gossip, and economi- 
cal speculations, and God knows what, a medium 
in which we walk and through which we look 
abroad. We study shop windows with other eyes 
than in our childhood, never to wonder, not always 
to admire, but to make and modify our little in- 
congruous theories about life. It is no longer the 
uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention ; 
but perhaps the flowing carriage of a woman, or 
perhaps a countenance that has been vividly 
stamped with passion and carries an adventurous 
story written in its lines. The pleasure of sur- 
prise is passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts 
seem mighty tame to encounter; and we walk the 
streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor 
must we deny that a good many of us walk them 
solely for the purposes of transit or in the interest 
of a livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look 
back with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, 
but the rest are in a better case; they know more 
than when they were children, they understand 
better, their desires and sympathies answer more 
nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their 



2i6 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

minds are brimming with interest as they go about 
the world. 

According to my contention, this is a flight to 
which children cannot rise. They are wheeled 
in perambulators or dragged about by nurses in 
a pleasing stupor. A vague, faint, abiding won- 
derment possesses them. Here and there some 
specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water- 
cart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into the 
seat of thought and calls them, for half a mo- 
ment, out of themselves; and you may see them, 
still towed forward sideways by the inexorable 
nurse as by a sort of destiny, but still staring at 
the bright object in their wake. It may be some 
minutes before another such moving spectacle re- 
awakens them to the world in which they dwell. 
For other children, they almost invariably show 
some intelligent sympathy. " There is a fine 
fellow making mud pies," they seem to say ; " that 
I can understand, there is some sense in mud 
pies." But the doings of their elders, unless where 
they are speakingly picturesque or recommend 
themselves by the quality of being easily imitable, 



CHILD'S PLAY 217 

they let them go over their heads (as we say) 
without the least regard. If it were not for this 
perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to 
fancy they despised us outright, or only considered 
us in the light of creatures brutally strong and 
brutally silly; among whom they condescended to 
dwell in obedience like a philosopher at a bar- 
barous court. At times, indeed, they display an 
arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering. 
Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical 
pain, a young gentleman came into the room and 
nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and 
arrow. He made no account of my groans, which 
he accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as 
a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; 
and like a wise young gentleman, he would waste 
no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who 
care so little for rational enjoyment, and are even 
the enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he 
had accepted without understanding and without 
complaint, as the rest of us accept the scheme of 
the universe. 

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, 



2i8 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

give and take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride 
far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the while 
sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. 
This is exactly what a child cannot do, or does 
not do, at least, when he can find anything else. 
He works all with lay figures and stage proper- 
ties. When his story comes to the fighting, he 
must rise, get something by way of a sword and 
have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he 
is out of breath. When he comes to ride with 
the king's pardon, he must bestride a chair, which 
he will so hurry and belabour and on which he 
will so furiously demean himself, that the mes- 
senger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, 
at least fiery red with haste. If his romance in- 
volves an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber 
in person about the chest of drawers and fall 
bodily upon the carpet, before his imagination is 
satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, 
are in the same category and answer the same end. 
Nothing can stagger a child's faith ; he accepts the 
clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most 
staring incongruities. The chair he has just been 



CHILD'S PLAY 219 

besieging as a castle, or valiantly cutting to the 
ground as a dragon, is taken away for the accom- 
modation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing 
abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a sta- 
tionary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted 
pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the 
gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's 
dinner. He can make abstraction of whatever 
does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes 
into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an 
unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the 
ways of children cross with those of their elders 
in a hundred places daily, they never go in the 
same direction nor so much as lie in the same 
element. So may the telegraph wires intersect 
the line of the highroad, or so might a landscape 
painter and a bagman visit the same country, and 
yet move in different worlds. 

People struck with these spectacles, cry aloud 
about the power of imagination in the young. 
Indeed there may be two words to that. It is, in 
some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child 
exhibits. It is the grown people who make the 



220 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

nursery stories ; all the children do, is jealously 
to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons 
why Robinson Crusoe should be so popular with 
youth, is that it hits their level in this matter to 
a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and 
had, in so many words, to play at a great variety 
of professions ; and then the book is all about tools, 
and there is nothing that delights a child so much. 
Hammers and saws belong to a province of life 
that positively calls for imitation. The juvenile 
lyrical drama, surely of the most ancient Thes- 
pian model, wherein the trades of mankind are 
successively simulated to the running burthen 
" On a cold and frosty morning," gives a good 
instance of the artistic taste in children. And 
this need for overt action and lay figures testifies 
to a defect in the child's imagination which pre- 
vents him from carrying out his novels in the 
privacy of his own heart. He does not yet know 
enough of the world and men. His experience is 
incomplete. That stage-wardrobe and scene-room 
that we call the memory is so ill provided, that 
he can overtake few combinations and body out 



CHILD'S PLAY 221 

few stories, to his own content, without some ex- 
ternal aid. He is at the experimental stage; he 
is not sure how one would feel in certain cir- 
cumstances; to make sure, he must come as near 
trying it as his means permit. And so here is 
young heroism with a wooden sword, and mothers 
practise their kind vocation over a bit of jointed 
stick. It may be laughable enough just now; but 
it is these same people and these same thoughts, 
that not long hence, when they are on the theatre 
of life, will make you weep and tremble. For 
children think very much the same thoughts and 
dream the same dreams, as bearded men and mar- 
riageable women. No one is more romantic. 
Fame and honour, the love of young men and 
the love of mothers, the business man's pleasure 
in method, all these and others they anticipate 
and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us, who 
are further advanced and fairly dealing with the 
threads of destiny, they only glance from time to 
time to glean a hint for their own mimetic re- 
production. Two children playing at soldiers are 
far more interesting to each other than one of the 



222 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. 
This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all. " Art 
for Art " is their motto; and the doings of grown 
folk are only interesting as the raw material for 
play. Not Theophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can 
look more callously upon life, or rate the repro- 
duction more highly over the reality; and they 
will parody an execution, a deathbed, or the 
funeral of the young man of Nain, with all the 
cheerfulness in the world. 

The true parallel for play is not to be found, 
of course, in conscious art, which, though it be 
derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal 
thing, and depends largely upon philosophical in- 
terests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when 
we make castles in the air and personate the lead- 
ing character in our own romances, that we return 
to the spirit of our first years. Only, there are 
several reasons why the spirit is no longer so 
agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit 
this personal element into our divagations we are 
apt to stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful mem- 
ories, and remind ourselves sharply of old wounds. 



CHILD'S PLAY 223 

Our day-dreams can no longer lie all in the air 
like a story in the Arabian Nights; they read to 
us rather like the history of a period in which 
we ourselves had taken part, where we come 
across many unfortunate passages and find our 
own conduct smartly reprimanded. And then the 
child, mind you, acts his parts. He does not 
merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs, 
and sets the blood agog over all his body. And 
so his play breathes him; and he no sooner 
assumes a passion than he gives it vent. Alas! 
when we betake ourselves to our intellectual form 
of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone 
in bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we 
can find no outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable 
to the mature mind, which desires the thing itself ; 
and even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with 
one's enemy, although it is perhaps the most sat- 
isfactory piece of play still left within our reach, 
is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead 
to a visit and an interview which may be the 
reverse of triumphant after all. 

In the child's world of dim sensation, play is 



224 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

all in all. " Making believe " is the gist of his 
whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk 
except in character. I could not learn my alpha- 
bet without some suitable mise-en-scene, and had 
to act a business man in an office before I could 
sit down to my book. Will you kindly question 
your memory, and find out how much you did, 
work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, 
and for how much you had to cheat yourself with 
some invention? I remember, as though it were 
yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and 
self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios 
in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. 
Children are even content to forego what we call 
the realities, and prefer the shadow to the sub- 
stance. When they might be speaking intelli- 
gibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by 
the hour, and are quite happy because they are 
making believe to speak French. I have said al- 
ready how even the imperious appetite of hunger 
suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose 
with the fag end of an old song. And it goes 
deeper than this: when children are together even 



CHILD'S PLAY 225 

a meal is felt as an interruption in the business 
of life; and they must find some imaginative 
sanction, and tell themselves some sort of story, to 
account for, to colour, to render entertaining, the 
simple processes of eating and drinking. What 
wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of 
the pattern upon tea-cups ! — from which there 
followed a code of rules and a whole world of 
excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank 
as a game. When my cousin and I took our por- 
ridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven 
the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, 
and explained it to be a country continually 
buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and 
explained it to be a country suffering gradual in- 
undation. You can imagine us exchanging bul- 
letins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, 
here a valley not yet covered with snow ; what 
inventions were made ; how his population lived 
in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and 
how mine was always in boats ; how the interest 
grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground 
was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every 

15 



226 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

moment; and how, in fine, the food was of al- 
together secondary importance, and might even 
have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it 
with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting 
moments I ever had over a meal, were in the 
case of calves' feet jelly. It was hardly possible 
not to believe — and you may be sure, so far from 
trying, I did all I could to favour the illusion — 
that some part of it was hollow, and that sooner 
or later my spoon would lay open the secret tab- 
ernacle of the golden rock. There, might some 
miniature Red Beard await his hour ; there, might 
one find the treasures of the Forty Thieves, and 
bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And 
so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savour- 
ing the interest. Believe me, I had little palate 
left for the jelly ; and though I preferred the taste 
when I took cream with it, I used often to go 
without, because the cream dimmed the trans- 
parent fractures. 

Even with games, this spirit is authoritative 
with right-minded children. It is thus that hide- 
and-seek has so pre-eminent a sovereignty, for it 



CHILD'S PLAY 227 

is the well-spring of romance, and the actions and 
the excitement to which it gives rise lend them- 
selves to almost any sort of fable. And thus 
cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity, pal- 
pably about nothing and for no end, often fails 
to satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if you 
like, but not a game of play. You cannot tell 
yourself a story about cricket ; and the activity it 
calls forth can be justified on no rational theory. 
Even football, although it admirably simulates the 
tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented 
difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after 
verisimilitude ; and I knew at least one little boy 
who was mightily exercised about the presence 
of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, when- 
ever he came to play, with an elaborate story of 
enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of 
talisman bandied about in conflict between two 
Arabian nations. 

To think of such a frame of mind, is to become 
disquieted about the bringing up of children. 
Surely they dwell in a mythological epoch, and 
are not the contemporaries of their parents. What 



228 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

can they think of them? what can they make of 
these bearded or petticoated giants who look down 
upon their games? who move upon a cloudy 
Olympus, following unknown designs apart from 
rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest 
solicitude for children, and yet every now and 
again reach down out of their altitude and ter- 
ribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes 
the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebel- 
lious. Were there ever such unthinkable deities 
as parents? I would give a great deal to know 
what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's un- 
varnished feeling. A sense of past cajolery; a 
sense of personal attraction, at best very feeble; 
above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for 
the untried residue of mankind : go to make up 
the attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor 
little heart, with such a weltering world in front 
of him. if he clings to the hand he knows! 
The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as it 
seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready 
to forget. " O, why," I remember passionately 
wondering, " why can we not all be happy and 



CHILD'S PLAY 229 

devote ourselves to play?" And when children 
do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very 
much the same purpose.* 

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of 
these considerations ; that whatever we are to ex- 
pect at the hands of children, it should not be any 
peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They 
walk in a vain show, and among mists and rain- 
bows ; they are passionate after dreams and un- 
concerned about realities ; speech is a difficult art 
not wholly learned ; and there is nothing in their 
own tastes or purposes to teach them what we 
mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad 
writer is inexact, even if he can look back on half 
a century of years, we charge him with incom- 
petence and not with dishonesty. And why not 
extend the same allowance to imperfect speakers? 
Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or 
a poet inexact in the details of business, and we 
excuse them heartily from blame. But show us 
a miserable, unbreeched, human entity, whose 
whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified 
town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, 



230 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

and who passes three-fourths of his time in a 
dream and the rest in open self-deception, and we 
expect him to be as nice, upon a matter of fact as 
a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my 
heart, I think it less than decent. You do not 
consider how little the child sees, or how swift 
he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering 
fiction ; and that he cares no more for what you 
call truth, than you for a gingerbread dragoon. 

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is 
very inquiring as to the precise truth of stories. 
But indeed this is a very different matter, and 
one bound up with the subject of play, and the 
precise amount of playfulness, or playability, to 
be looked for in the world. Many such burning 
questions must arise in the course of nursery 
education. Among the fauna of this planet, which 
already embraces the pretty soldier and the ter- 
rifying Irish beggarman, is, or is not, the child 
to expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, 
or is he not, to look out for magicians, kindly 
and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably 
hope to be cast away upon a desert island, or 



CHILD'S PLAY 231 

turned to such diminutive proportions that he can 
live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and 
go a cruise in his own toy schooner? Surely all 
these are practical questions to a neophyte enter- 
ing upon life with a view to play. Precision 
upon such a point, the child can understand. But 
if you merely ask him of his past behaviour, as 
to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck 
such and such a match ; or whether he had looked 
into a parcel or gone by a forbidden path, — why, 
he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is 
ten to one, he has already half forgotten and half 
bemused himself with subsequent imaginings. 

It would be easy to leave them in their native 
cloud-land, where they figure so prettily — pretty 
like flowers and innocent like dogs. They will 
come out of their gardens soon enough, and have 
to go into offices and the witness-box. Spare them 
yet awhile, O conscientious parent ! Let them doze 
among their playthings yet a little ! for who knows 
what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them 
in the future? 



WALKING TOURS 

IT must not be imagined that a walking tour, 
as some would have us fancy, is merely a 
better or worse way of seeing the country. 
There are many ways of seeing landscape quite 
as good; and none more vivid, in spite of cant- 
ing dilettantes, than from a railway train. But 
landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. 
He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not 
voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of cer- 
tain jolly humours — of the hope and spirit with 
which the march begins at morning, and the peace 
and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest. He 
cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or 
takes it off, with more delight. The excitement 
of the departure puts him in key for that of the 
arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward 
in itself, but will be further rewarded in the se- 
quel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an 



WALKING TOURS 233 

endless chain. It is this that so few can un- 
derstand; they will either be always lounging or 
always at five miles an hour; they do not play 
off the one against the other, prepare all day for 
the evening, and all evening for the next day. 
And, above all, it is here that your overwalker 
fails of comprehension. His heart rises against 
those who drink their curaqoa in liqueur glasses, 
when he himself can swill it in a brown John. 
He will not believe that the flavour is more deli- 
cate in the smaller dose. He will not believe that 
to walk this unconscionable distance is merely to 
stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to his inn, 
at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and 
a starless night of darkness in his spirit. Not 
for him the mild luminous evening of the tem- 
perate walker! He has nothing left of man but 
a physical need for bedtime and a double night- 
cap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will 
be savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate 
of such an one to take twice as much trouble 
as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss the 
happiness in the end; he is the man of the 



234 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

proverb, in short, who goes further and fares 
worse. 

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour 
should be gone upon alone. If you go in a com- 
pany, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking 
tour in anything but name; it is something else 
and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking 
tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom 
is of the essence ; because you should be able to 
stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as 
the freak takes you ; and because you must have 
your own pace, and neither trot alongside a cham- 
pion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And 
then you must be open to all impressions and let 
your thoughts take colour from what you see. 
You should be as a pipe for any wind to play 
upon. " I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, " of 
walking and talking at the same time. When I 
am in the country I wish to vegetate like the 
country," — which is the gist of all that can be 
said upon the matter. There should be no cackle 
of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative 
silence of the morning:. And so lone; as a man 



WALKING TOURS 235 

is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that 
fine intoxication that comes of much motion in 
the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and 
sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace 
that passes comprehension. 

During the first day or so of any tour there 
are moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels 
more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he 
is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the 
hedge and, like Christian on a similar occasion, 
" give three leaps and go on singing." And yet 
it soon acquires a property of easiness. It be- 
comes magnetic ; the spirit of the journey enters 
into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps 
over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are 
cleared from you, you pull yourself together with 
a shake, and fall at once into your stride. And 
surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man 
takes the road, is the best. Of course, if he will 
keep thinking of his anxieties, if he will open the 
merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm 
with the hag — why, wherever he is, and whether 
he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will 



236 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

not be happy. And so much the more shame to 
himself! There are perhaps thirty men setting 
forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large 
wager there is not another dull face among the 
thirty. It would be a fine thing to follow, in a 
coat of darkness, one after another of these way- 
farers, some summer morning, for the first few 
miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, 
with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated 
in his own mind ; he is up at his loom, weaving 
and weaving, to set the landscape to words. This 
one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses ; 
he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies ; 
he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot 
look enough upon the complacent kine. And here 
comes another, talking, laughing, and gesticulat- 
ing to himself. His face changes from time to 
time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger 
clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, 
delivering orations, and conducting the most im- 
passioned interviews, by the way. A little farther 
on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. 
And well for him, supposing him to be no great 



WALKING TOURS 237 

master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid 
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I 
scarcely know which is the more troubled, or 
whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of 
your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your 
clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, be- 
sides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the 
common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself 
the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man 
who was arrested as- a runaway lunatic, because, 
although a full-grown person with a red beard, 
he skipped as he went like a child. And you 
would be astonished if I were to tell you all the 
grave and learned heads who have confessed to 
me that, when on walking tours, they sang — 
and sang very ill — and had a pair of red ears 
when, as described above, the inauspicious peas- 
ant plumped into their arms from round a cor- 
ner. And here, lest you should think I am 
exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his 
essay On Going a Journey, which is so good that 
there should be a tax levied on all who have not 
read it: 



238 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

" Give me the clear blue sky over my head," 
says he, " and the green turf beneath my feet, a 
winding road before me, and a three hours' march 
to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if 
I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. 
I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." 

Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend with 
the policeman, you would not have cared, would 
you, to publish that in the first person? But we 
have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, 
must all pretend to be as dull and foolish as our 
neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And 
notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout 
the essay) in the theory of walking tours. He is 
none of your athletic men in purple stockings, 
who walk their* fifty miles a day: three hours' 
march is his ideal. And then he must have a 
winding road, the epicure! 

Yet there is one thing I object to in these 
words of his, one thing in the great master's 
practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do 
not approve of that leaping and running. Both 
of these hurry the respiration; they both shake 



WALKING TOURS 239 

up the brain out of its glorious open-air confu- 
sion; and they both break the pace. Uneven 
walking is not so agreeable to the body, and it 
distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when 
once you have fallen into an equable stride, it 
requires no conscious thought from you to keep 
it up, and yet it prevents you from thinking ear- 
nestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the 
work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises 
and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. 
We can think of this or that, lightly and laugh- 
ingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morn- 
ing doze; we can make puns or puzzle out 
acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with 
words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest 
work, when we come to gather ourselves together 
for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud 
and long as we please; the great barons of the 
mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each 
one, at home, warming his hands over his own 
fire and brooding on his own private thought! 

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there 
is much variance in the mood. From the cxhila- 



2 4 o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

ration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the 
arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day 
goes on, the traveller moves from the one ex- 
treme towards the other. He becomes more and 
more incorporated with the material landscape, 
and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him 
with great strides, until he posts along the road, 
and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful 
dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the 
second stage is the more peaceful. A man does 
not make so many articles towards the end, nor 
does he laugh aloud ; but the purely animal pleas- 
ures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the delight 
of every inhalation, of every time the muscles 
tighten down the thigh, console him for the ab- 
sence of the others, and bring him to his desti- 
nation still content. 

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. 
You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place 
where deep ways meet under trees ; and off goes 
the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe 
in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the 
birds come round and look at you ; and your 



WALKING TOURS 241 

smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under the 
blue dome of heaven ; and the sun lies warm upon 
your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and 
turns aside your open shirt. If you are not 
happy, you must have an evil conscience. You 
may dally as long as you like by the roadside. 
It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, 
when we shall throw our clocks and watches over 
the housetop, and remember time and seasons no 
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was 
going to say, to live for ever. You have no idea, 
unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is 
a summer's day, that you measure out only by 
hunger, and bring to an end only when you are 
drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly 
any clocks, where no one knows more of the days 
of the week than by a sort of instinct for the 
fete on Sundays, and where only one person can 
tell you the day of the month, and she is gener- 
ally wrong; and if people were aware how slow 
Time journeyed in that village, and what arm- 
fuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the 

bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there 

16 



242 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, 
Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the 
clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out 
each one faster than the other, as though they 
were all in a wager. And all these foolish pil- 
grims would each bring his own misery along 
with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, 
there were no clocks and watches in the much- 
vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of 
course, there were no appointments, and punctu- 
ality was not yet thought upon. " Though ye 
take from a covetous man all his treasure," says 
Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot 
deprive him of his covetousness." And so I 
would say of a modern man of business, you may 
do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give 
him the elixir of life — he has still a flaw at 
heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there 
is no time when business habits are more miti- 
gated than on a walking tour. And so during 
these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free. 

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the 
best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be 



WALKING TOURS 243 

smoked as those that follow a good day's march ; 
the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be re- 
membered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and 
so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, 
you will own there was never such grog; at 
every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your 
limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read 
a book — and you will never do so save by fits 
a::d starts — you find the language strangely racy 
and harmonious; words take a new meaning; 
single sentences possess the ear for half an hour 
together; and the writer endears himself to you, 
at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sen- 
timent. It seems as if it were a book you had 
written yourself in a dream. To all we have 
read on such occasions we look back with special 
favour. " It was on the 10th of April, 1798," 
says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, " that I sat 
down to a volume of the new Hclo'isc, at the 
Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and 
a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, 
for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, 
we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of 



244 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a 
capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would 
a volume of Heine's songs; and for Tristram 
Shandy I can pledge a fair experience. 

If the evening be fine and warm, there is noth- 
ing better in life than to lounge before the inn 
door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of 
the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick 
fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality 
to the full significance of that audacious word. 
Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so 
clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you 
move or sit still, whatever you do is done with 
pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in 
talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or 
sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged 
you, more than of anything else, of all narrow- 
ness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part 
freely, as in a child or a man of science. You 
lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provin- 
cial humours develop themselves before you, now 
as a laughable farce, and now grave and beauti- 
ful like an old tale. 



WALKING TOURS 245 

Or perhaps you are left to your own company 
for the night, and surly weather imprisons you 
by the fire. You may remember how Burns, 
numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours 
when he has been " happy thinking." It is a 
phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, 
girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, 
and haunted, even at night, by flaming dial- 
plates. For we are all so busy, and have so 
many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the 
fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a 
gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure 
trips into the Land of Thought and among the 
Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when 
we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded 
hands; and a changed world for most of us, 
when we find we can pass the hours without 
discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in 
such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be 
gathering gear, to make our voice audible a 
moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that 
we forget that one thing, of which these are but 
the parts — namely, to live. We fall in love, we 



246 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth 
like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask 
yourself if, when all is done, you would not have 
been better to sit by the fire at home, and be 
happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate, — 
to remember the faces of women without desire, 
to be pleased by the great deeds of men without 
envy, to be everything and everywhere in sym- 
pathy, and yet content to remain where and what 
you are — is not this to know both wisdom and 
virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, 
it is not they who carry flags, but they who look 
upon it from a private chamber, who have the 
fun of the procession. And once you are at that, 
you are in the very humour of all social heresy. 
It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty 
words. If you ask yourself what you mean by 
fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to 
seek; and you go back into that kingdom of 
light imaginations, which seem so vain in the 
eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and 
so momentous to those who are stricken with the 
disproportions of the world, and, in the face of 



WALKING TOURS 247 

the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences 
between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, 
such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a 
million of money or a fiddlestick's end. 

You lean from the window, your last pipe 
reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full 
of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the 
seventh circle of content ; when suddenly the 
mood changes, the weathercock goes about, and 
you ask yourself one question more : whether, 
for the interval, you have been the wisest philos- 
opher or the most egregious of donkeys? Human 
experience is not yet able to reply; but at least 
you have had a fine moment, and looked down 
upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether 
it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's travel will 
carry you, body and mind, into some different 
parish of the infinite. 



PAN'S PIPES 

THE world in which we live has been 
variously said and sung by the most 
ingenious poets and philosophers : these 
reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, 
those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures 
for the handiwork of God. What experience sup- 
plies is of a mingled tissue, and the choosing 
mind has much to reject before it can get to- 
gether the materials of a theory. Dew and thun- 
der, destroying Attila and the Spring lambkins, 
belong to an order of contrasts which no repeti- 
tion can assimilate. There is an uncouth, out- 
landish strain throughout the web of the world, 
as from a vexatious planet in the house of life. 
Things are not congruous and wear strange dis- 
guises: the consummate flower is fostered out of 
dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with 
heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into 



PAN'S PIPES 249 

indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, 
Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and 
filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the 
kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with 
the scientific spy-glass, is found to issue from the 
most portentous nightmare of the universe — the 
great, conflagrant sun : a world of hell's squibs, 
tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The 
sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of 
the scene which he inhabits; and you would not 
fancy there was a green or habitable spot in the 
universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is 
by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which the 
fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all 
our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the 
arbour door. 

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now 
terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were 
dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer 
noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the 
hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in 
so figuring, uttered the last word of human ex- 
perience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter 



250 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

and motion and elastic ethers, and the hypothesis 
of this or that other spectacled professor, tell a 
speaking story ; but for youth and all ductile and 
congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the 
classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph ; goat- 
footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type 
of the shaggy world : and in every wood, if you 
go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear 
the note of his pipe. 

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with 
gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives 
clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; 
fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, 
lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds sing 
among the trees in pairing-time? What means 
the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon 
the leafy forest? To what tune does the fisher- 
man whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, 
and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? 
These are all airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was 
who gave them breath in the exultation of his 
heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow with 
his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of herds- 



PAN'S PIPES 251 

men, shaking the dells with laughter and striking 
out high echoes from the rock ; the tune of mov- 
ing feet in the lamplit city, or on the smooth 
ball-room floor; the hooves of many horses, beat- 
ing the wide pastures in alarm ; the song of 
hurrying rivers; the colour of clear skies; and 
smiles and the live touch of hands; and the voice 
of things, and their significant look, and the reno- 
vating influence they breathe forth — these are his 
joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads 
in choral harmony. To this music the young 
lambs bound as to a tabor, and the London 
shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. For it puts 
a spirit of gladness in all hearts ; and to look 
on the happy side of nature is common, in their 
hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under 
a good influence, are pleasing whenever they are 
pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, 
as a child who, looking upon lovely things, looks 
lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, 
and make a halting figure in the universal dance. 
And some, like sour spectators at the play, re- 
ceive the music into their hearts with an unmoved 



252 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

countenance, and walk .like strangers through the 
general rejoicing. But let him feign never so 
carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses 
shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and 
sets the world a-singing. 

Alas if that were all ! But oftentimes the air 
is changed ; and in the screech of the night wind, 
chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and the 
rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly 
levin or the fury of headlong floods, we recog- 
nise the " dread foundation " of life and the 
anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages open war 
against her children, and under her softest touch 
hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite 
us in to drown ; the domestic hearth burns up 
in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all. 
Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly, not 
in itself, but by its circumstances. For a few 
bright days in England the hurricane must break 
forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous 
ships. And when the universal music has led 
lovers into the paths of dalliance, confident of 
Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into 



PAN'S PIPES 2S3 

a minor, and death makes a clutch from his am- 
buscade below the bed of marriage. For death 
is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are 
fatal ; and into this life, where one thing preys 
upon another, the child too often makes its en- 
trance from the mother's corpse. It is no won- 
der, with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the 
wise people who created for us the idea of Pan 
thought that of all fears the fear of him was the 
most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we 
preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon 
dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for 
the threat that runs through all the winning music 
of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose 
because of the thorn, and from life because of 
death : this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly 
respectable citizens who flee life's pleasures and 
responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon 
the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand 
and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how 
surprised they would be if they could hear their 
attitude mythologically expressed, and knew them- 
selves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from 



254 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

Nature because they fear the hand of Nature's 
Gocl! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the 
banker instantly concealed in the bank parlour ! 
For to distrust one's impulses is to be recreant 
to Pan. 

There are moments when the mind refuses to 
be satisfied with evolution, and demands a rud- 
dier presentation of the sum of man's experience. 
Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter 
at the humourous side of life, as when, abstract- 
ing ourselves from earth, we imagine people plod- 
ding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, 
with the planet all the while whirling in the op- 
posite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they 
travel back-foremost through the universe of space. 
Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and 
sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there 
will always be hours when we refuse to be put 
off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science ; 
and demand instead some palpitating image of our 
estate, that shall represent the troubled and un- 
certain element in which we dwell, and satisfy 
reason by the means of art. Science writes of 



PAN'S PIPES 255 

the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish ; 
it is all true; but what is it when compared to 
the reality of which it discourses? where hearts 
beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills 
totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour 
over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all 
noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made 
her dwelling among men? So we come back to 
the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper mak- 
ing the music which is itself the charm and terror 
of things ; and when a glen invites our visiting 
footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a 
gracious tremolo ; or when our hearts quail at the 
thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has 
stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket. 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 

CITIES given, the problem was to light 
them. How to conduct individual citi- 
zens about the burgess-warren, when once 
heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or 

— since we live in a scientific age — when once 
our spinning planet has turned its back upon the 
sun? The moon, from time to time, was doubt- 
less very helpful ; the stars had a cheery look 
among the chimney-pots; and a cresset here and 
there, on church or citadel, produced a fine pic- 
torial effect, and, in places where the ground lay 
unevenly, held out the right hand of conduct to 
the benighted. But sun, moon, and stars abstracted 
or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to 
fall back — we speak on the authority of old prints 

— upon stable lanthorns, two stories in height. 
Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of 
this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzle- 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 257 

ment into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced 
forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own 
sun by a ring about his finger, day and night 
swung to and fro and up and down about his 
footsteps. Blackness haunted his path; he was 
beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew 
being struck, he found no light but that he trav- 
elled in throughout the township. 

Closely following on this epoch of migratory 
lanthorns in a world of extinction, came the era 
of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to extinguish, 
pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. 
Rudely puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly 
clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and, lo! in 
a moment night re-established her void empire, 
and the cit groped along the wall, suppered but 
bedless, occult from guidance, and sorrily wading 
in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and game- 
some youths were not sufficient, it was the habit 
to sling these feeble luminaries from house to 
house above the fairway. There, on invisible 
cordage, let them swing! And suppose some 
crane-necked general to go speeding by on a tall 

17 



258 VIRGINI-BUS PUERISQUE 

charger, spurring the destiny of nations, red-hot 
in expedition, there would indubitably be some 
effusion of military blood, and oaths, and a cer- 
tain crash of glass; and while the chieftain rode 
forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would 
be left to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyage- 
able, a province of the desert night. 

The conservative, looking before and after, 
draws from each contemplation the matter for 
content. Out of the age of gas lamps he glances 
back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which 
his ancestors wandered; his heart waxes jocund 
at the contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a 
stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding prog- 
ress and the golden mean. When gas first spread 
along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for 
the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun 
for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and 
begun with proper circumstance, becoming its own 
birthright. The work of Prometheus had ad- 
vanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper 
parties were no longer at the mercy of a few 
miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the 



>'" A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 259 

promenade; and the day was lengthened out to 
every man's fancy. The city-folk had stars of 
their own ; biddable, domesticated stars. 

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet 
so clear, as their originals ; nor indeed was their 
lustre so elegant as that of the best wax candles. 
But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were 
more practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. 
It is true, again, that they did not unfold their 
rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the 
planets, coming out along the firmament one after 
another, as the need arises. But the lamp- 
lighters took to their heels every evening, and 
ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see 
man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's 
orbs ; and though perfection was not absolutely 
reached, and now and then an individual may 
have been knocked on the head by the ladder of 
the flying functionary, yet people commended his 
zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to 
say, " God bless the lamplighter ! " And since 
his passage was a piece of the day's programme, 
the children were well pleased to repeat the bene- 



i6o VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

diction, not, of course, in so many words, which 
would have been improper, but in some chaste 
circumlocution, suitable for infant lips. 

God bless him, indeed ! For the term of his 
twilight diligence is near at hand ; and for not 
much longer shall we watch him speeding up the 
street and, at measured intervals, knocking another 
luminous hole into the dusk. The Greeks would 
have made a noble myth of such an one; how he 
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was 
over, re-collected it ; and the little bull's-eye, which 
was his instrument, and held enough fire to kindle 
a whole parish, would have been fitly commem- 
orated in the legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, 
his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in the 
light of victory himself shall disappear. For an- 
other advance has been effected. Our tame stars 
are to come out in future, not one by one, but all 
in a body and at once. A sedate electrician some- 
where in a back office touches a spring — and be- 
hold ! from one end to another of the city, from 
east to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal 
Palace, there is light ! Fiat Lux, says the sedate 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 261 

electrician. What a spectacle, on some clear, dark 
nightfall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when 
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the de- 
sign of the monstrous city flashes into vision — 
a glittering hieroglyph many square miles in 
'extent ; and when, to borrow and debase an image, 
all the evening street lamps burst together into 
song ! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded 
the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall. 
Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight 
of civilisation ; the compensatory benefit for an 
innumerable array of factories and bankers' clerks. 
To the artistic spirit exercised about Thirlmere, 
here is a crumb of consolation; consolatory, at 
least, to such of them as look out upon the world 
through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty 
where it comes. 

But the conservative, while lauding progress, is 
ever timid of innovation ; his is the hand upheld 
to counsel pause ; his is the signal advising slow 
advance. The word electricity now sounds the 
note of danger. In Paris, at the mouth of the 
Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera 



262 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

portico, and in the Rue Drouot at the Figaro 
office, a new sort of urban star now shines out 
nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the 
human eye ; a lamp for a nightmare ! Such a light 
as this should shine only on murders and public! 
crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, 
a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only 
once is to fall in love with gas, which gives a 
warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, 
you would have thought, might have remained 
content with what Prometheus stole for them and 
not gone fishing the profound heaven with kites 
to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm. 
Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors, 
and it is proposed that we should henceforward 
take our walks abroad in the glare of permanent 
lightning. A man need not be very superstitious 
if he scruple to follow his pleasures by the light 
of the Terror that Flieth, nor very epicurean if 
he prefer to see the face of beauty more becom- 
ingly displayed. That ugly blinding glare may 
not improperly advertise the home of slander- 
ous Figaro, which is a back-shop to the infernal 



A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS 263 

regions ; but where soft joys prevail, where people 
are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher looks 
on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and 
deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old 
mild lustre shine upon the ways of man. 



